Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2007

By Véronique Petit.

Overview:
A photographer and director and producer of documentary films, Catherine de Clippel has practiced her professions mainly in West Africa. Working with anthropologists Marc Augé and Jean-Paul Colleyn, since the beginning of the 1980s she has made a series of films on both urban and rural animist practices in Africa nd also in Brazil and Venezuela.
The photos that appear in this article were taken by Clippel in Mali and Togo between 1980 and 2006 as part of an extended and close collaboration with Colleyn. Working with anthropologists, familiarity with the territory, and a lot of patience enabled her to "know" her subject matter. Sacred objects––often called fetishes in the West––are used in rituals that share some of the qualities of a "performance." They may function as spiritual apparitions and their meanings are often difficult to grasp. The events surrounding them are very different from performances in the European sense of the word. There is no audience, only participants. Photographing these "secret" worlds, forbidden to the uninitiated, is not about randomly shooting human subjects (or waiting until they let their guard down), but requires being present, or visible, just as are the chief, the masks, and the fetish objects. Each has a role to play, and Clippel's was to take photographs. Her images attest to the engagement of the living in making connections with the departed. The power and vital spirit of the latter are present everywhere: in theh masks, the objects, and the dancers' bodies. All the elements act in concert and together they represent the spirit that resides within each of them. The form these spirits take is not absolute but attempts are made in their representation. While spirits can invest themselves in objects––altars, fetishes, trees, stones, masks, and even human bodies, which they take possession of––these are only outward manifestations. They are always her, there, and everywhere simultaneously. As a West African saying goes, men may need the gods, but the gods need men too, and without them they are nothing. The depiction of the spirits is a metaphysical effort that attempts to render the invisible visible.
What Clippel has tried to capture in her documentation of these rituals is a society acting in its entirety and on multiple levels. The structure that is revealed often incorporates unexpected humor, and her images contradict the commonly held vision of misery, violence, and chaos we all too often evoke when we think of Africa in modern times.