Obama: Black Europeans Respond
This series of works depicts Black men and women from all over Europe. The words yes I can have been translated into French, German , British English and Italian and the word order remixed within the picture. I wanted these translated and remixed words to reflect the position of black Europeans vis a vis Obama's powerful positive massive media statement.
This statement is so shockingly powerfully positive an hopeful in an Ur American way I wanted to see how these words would taste and sound like coming out of the mouth of a black Italian or Black Frenchwoman. What might these works mean in this new black context? The viewer is invited to try and interpret, try to understandusing their own detailed or limited knowledge of black communities in European capitals.
Black Europeans have in comparison to Black Americans only limited access to media and would find it difficult to make statements of their own with anything like the pervasiveness of black Americans be it on a religious, musical, sports, or political arena. The people in the pictures show that they can at best rearrange translate and refract the predetermined blocks of American culture. The words yes I can are translated and rearranged in all the images.
Black Europeans often move between countries within and outside of Europe their status in one country is often very different according to whether they are in or outside of Europe. This is because they are earning the Eur o images of which are in collage in all the works of this series. The figures are wearing badly fitting crowns made up of European currency. This is a representation of that dual status: when you go outside of Europe with your hard earned Euros you are like a king or a queen return to Europe and the crown slips.
The images also suggest that earning European money also shapes the vision of black Europeans we as viewers and the figures looking out do so through the haze of a European note.
Overlaying the monetary images is a remixed version of the speakers national flags. The French woman has the outline of the French flag the tricolor behind her but the colors have been remixed. Often the red green yellow and black found in so many African flags have been substituted . Sometimes more mythical colors hardly ever found in flags like orange an purple have been substituted. Both changes represent either a halfway nationhood between African and Europe or a kind of mythical nationhood denoting no place is home.
Black Europeans don't often have the opportunity to identify with their country of birth in quite the same selbstverstäandlich way that Black Americans do. Often you will be asked but where do you really come from, you are a fake citizen concealing another real citizenship. This experience of constantly having your citizenship undermined is like being a note that is held up to the light to see where the prufzeichen is. In this series of images there is the metal strip that authenticates a European note running through the words if these black citizens. It represents the feeling that everything you say is being weighed up to see if you are really a genuine European citizen.
With these pieces I wanted to express immediately and spontaneously a joyful European response to Obama's inspirational American Presidential candidature from within the complicated framework many black people in Europe have to their nationhood.
