The relationship between the aesthetic and political is not a direct correlation, but depends on accumulating experiences of dissensual moments.
—Jaimey Hamilton Faris. Uncommon Goods: Global Dimensions of the Readymade. Intellect, 2013. p. 145.
A grid of over 100 luminous and brilliantly coloured swatches, less than a foot square each, and composed of tightly-woven seed beads, formed the centrepiece of this exhibition. The beaded swatches, designed by algorithms that take as input colours from the Pantone Fashion Color Report each spring and fall since 2015, are then outsourced for production to Bagalwa Baliahamwabo, a family friend of Paul Robert, and his ad hoc team of artisans in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
This ongoing work is a comically tragic re-staging of the antagonisms inherent in production and consumption under globalization. Immaterial labour in the form of commodities’ intellectual and cultural content is contrasted with something that sits uneasily between the romanticized craftsmanship of the indigenous artisan and the cheap manual labour of the foreign factory worker. Capital and commodities flow effortlessly between nations that in so many other ways remain literally worlds apart. Robert strives to give a fresh visibility to these conditions, recognizing his contribution as a single node in an ecosystem of more and less entitled, provocative, and idealistic voices.
Beadwork evokes a history of trade that continues to this day. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, Venetian glass beads were produced en masse specifically for trade with the colonies of the so-called “New World” and Africa. There, they underwent a process of commodity indigenization as they were incorporated into dress, custom, and ritual, and eventually sold back to European tourists as exotic souvenirs. Today, Canada is connected to Africa by flows of gold, copper, diamonds, and tungsten. Well-intentioned but simplistic responses, like the banning of conflict minerals, often make things worse for the poorest while performing the ideological function of absolving westerners of imagined links to warlords.
Mr. Bagalwa was a long-time correspondant with Robert's father, Aurèle Robert. He persisted in writing letters to the Robert family even after Aurèle's passing. Paul's eventual response to Mr. Bagalwa's remarkable agency has resulted in artifacts that he hopes contribute to the reconfiguration of the normalized logic of global labour-commodities into newly visible and meaningful materialities.
For more information about Robert’s work, visit his website.
