In recent years, museums have expressed their wishes to rethink their pasts, returning looted objects, acknowledging the original inhabitants of the land where they are located, and taking steps to deepen their collections of art by women and artists of color.
But a collective of artists and agricultural workers headquartered at a Congolese plantation is calling on them to do more, saying that these efforts “have had surprisingly little impact on the communities whose labor financed many of these very institutions.” The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, or CATPC) points out that many renowned global museums were built on income that was extracted from plantations and the exploited workers who staffed them and thus made “involuntary investments” in those museums.
CATPC points out that museums like London’s Tate Britain, Cologne’s Ludwig Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, all were reliant in their founding on proceeds from plantations—and they argue that that reliance is hardly a thing of the past. For example, Peter Ludwig, the German art collector for whom the Cologne museum is named, owned a German chocolate factory, a business reliant on cacao, much of which is farmed in Africa, while Henry Tate was a sugar merchant.
The toolkit was announced shortly after a CATPC exhibition, “Two Sides of the Same Coin,” at the Van Abbemuseum, funded by tobacco plantations in Indonesia (as was the Stedelijk, the group points out). The group bills the show as the first solo exhibition of a plantation worker community in a European contemporary art museum.
CATPC has developed a new toolkit in collaboration with Human Activities, founded in 2012 by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, who has collaborated with CATPC since its founding. “Seven Easy Steps for Museums to Liberate the Plantations that Funded Them” is available to museums online at no charge. It urges museum administrators to identify and publicize their debt to plantations, contact plantation workers in order to both educate them about the museums and learn about the plantation community, and design programs to enable the community to reap benefits. The toolkit calls for museums to “move from symbolic gestures toward material, cultural, and ecological liberation.”
Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam.
CATPC artists Mbuku Kimpala, Ced’art Tamasala, and Matthieu Kasiama presented the toolkit on Monday, November 10 at a conference at the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam on the subject of restitution, organized along with the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual arts and cultural heritage in the Netherlands and the Caribbean.
CATPC was established in 2014 by plantation workers in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The group makes art to heighten awareness of conditions for plantation workers. They aim to restore land depleted by plantation farming, restoring food security, bolstering biodiversity, and mitigating climate change. The group has also built a contemporary art museum, the White Cube, designed by architect David Gianotten, managing partner at Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA. They and Martens represented the Netherlands at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and their work appeared at the 2017 Armory Show in New York, coinciding with a well-received show at the SculptureCenter, in Queens. They create sculptures made of chocolate, and many of them work on plantations owned by multinational conglomerate Unilever, where they grow cacao. “Their sculptures are made of material at once ready-at-hand and powerfully symbolic,” wrote Zoé Samudzi in Art in America in 2020. “The specter of the non-native cacao plant’s violent history haunts the region, and also the use of chocolate in CATPC’s work.”
