In conversation with Katrina Nzegwu, artist Reginald Sylvester II and curator Diallo Simon-Ponte discuss architecture as flux, diasporic time, industrial materials, and the interplay of painting and sculpture in The Other Side of Languish, Limbo Museum’s inaugural exhibition.
Launched a year ago in a fragmentary carapace within the University of Ghana in Labone, Accra, Limbo Museum extends and expands upon the work of Limbo Accra – a spatial design studio established by Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Group in 2018.
With the question of what it means to design urban space with intention at its core, Limbo Accra draws upon the skeletons of buildings as sites of infinite potential, conducting activity spanning the researching, archiving, and activation of abandoned and incomplete edifices. Limbo Museum is an effective experiment in disrupting architectural fixity that investigates the power of architecture to shape not just physical space, but sociocultural and political realities. Founded by Petit-Frère, with Diallo Simon-Ponte as curatorial director, the meticulous selection and positioning of each artwork in relation to the Museum’s metamorphic spatiality is a fascinating provocation to maintain a reading of a building as an entity in an enduring state of flux.
Presented in partnership with Gallery 1957, the Museum’s inaugural exhibition, The Other Side of Languish, situates nineteen large-scale sculptures and seven paintings by Reginald Sylvester II upon the University’s East Legon campus. The purposefully minimalist works are a result of an extended residency undertaken by Sylvester; written into the materiality of the arching forms is a thorough understanding of, and responsiveness to, the Museum’s direct environment. Constellating the space in pairs, Sylvester’s steel sculptures command negative space in a manner that frames their function as gateways to the titular ‘other side’ – the incorporeal realm. Though monolithic in scale, each sculpture possesses a delicacy in the element of their formation that is cage-like – akin to the raw shell that houses them, they are motivic suggestions of an imagined, or prospective whole.
The audience is invited to project metaphorical meaning into these physical interstices. These layers of resonance, when coupled with his paintings – adorned planes of EPDM rubber, stretched taut across steel girders – mimic the building’s own stacked stories. The sculptures and paintings, both constituting different manifestations of the crescent shape, are tied in their recourse to the form of the slave ship; their curvature imitates the protuberant belly of the hulls that transported bodies from Africa to the Americas. With Ghana as a significant location with the Transatlantic trade, Sylvester’s recurrent demilunes further entrench the conceptual centrality of the exhibition’s contextual geography.
The Museum’s occupation of an incomplete building posits a show suspended in space, delightfully divorced from the notions of finitude proscribed by post-Enlightenment Western thought regarding progress. Reinforced by the proliferation of circularity, the works come to bear as a visualisation of non-linear time. The exhibition’s sense of temporal fracture speaks to the associative power of both the work and the wider mission of the Museum: to investigate the legacies of spaces in ‘limbo’ – not just the physical structures left behind, but the conversations, relationships and ideas held within them. On the occasion of Limbo Museum’s inaugural exhibition, I had the pleasure of speaking with Diallo Simon-Ponte and Reginald Sylvester II about materiality, intentionality, and response-ability.
Katrina Nzegwu: To start, how did you all meet, and what was the draw to stage this show in particular as Limbo Museum’s debut exhibition?
Diallo Simon-Ponte: I met Reginald in the same place I met Dominique, outside Nicolas Vassel Gallery in Chelsea. A few months later, I went for a studio visit. When we were thinking through Limbo Museum and what we wanted our first exhibition to look like – this pairing of a residency and exhibition, within the urban phenomenon of these unfinished buildings – the work needed to be an investigation of the interior and the exterior, the public and the private, to withstand weather and the environment. This just made sense with Reggie’s practice.
KN: I want to explore the notion of the space as a co-curator, insofar as you are “limited” by the extant elements of the structure – the way the exposed surfaces and natural light modulate one’s experience of the exhibition. Diallo, to what extent was inviting the raw material of the space to dictate the work’s placement a consideration within your curatorial approach?
DSP: That’s absolutely the way we were thinking about this larger artist residency programme. We split Reginald’s time in Accra into two separate trips; the first was around two and a half weeks, and that was really about gaining intimacy – with the building, with the space, with Accra, and with the land. The space was a [physical] co-curator, but also insofar as we wanted to make sure we were on the same frequency in terms of understanding this building. For the work not to be extractive of the space, but in beautiful harmony.
KN: Reggie, could you speak about your experience of this extended residency with the museum, and how your encounter with the city came to bear on the process of making these works?
Reginald Sylvester II: A word that I’ve hoped is the foundation, or at the forefront of my practice, is resilience. Going to the continent and the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora with Diallo and Dominique, talking with them about the history, fortitude, resilience, and strength of Ghana and its people… it’s in the air. I wanted the work to really speak to that.
Limbo Museum is on the University of Ghana, East Legon campus, which is obviously meant for learning, for discourse to be had. I was trying to figure out how I can take what I’m learning and seeing within these trips, and translate that through minimalism, through abstraction, through a sense of Afro-futurism. I feel like this space, this architectural, excavated sanctuary, if you will, enabled me to do that with the work – to not only transform the space, but also have the space transform the work.
The first trip was really about being enriched with a bit of history. We went to Tema, which is kind of on the outskirts of Ghana. I was able to work with Joseph Awumee, an incredible artist who also has an affinity for working with industrial materials – steels, metals, and so forth. He introduced me to his team of artisans, and I was able to work with them to create these works for the show. Just having them be a part of the process, and having their spirit and their ingenuity be a part of the work, was very important.
KN: Dominique is from Ghana, but both of you are part of the diaspora. I wanted to ask about this process of coming into communities and drawing on their knowledge and expertise. How do you honour protocols of respect and ensure that they are exchanged and not extracted?
DSP: I think the inheritance [of knowledge] that I’ve looked for has always been transatlantic. It’s been going on for decades, this transatlantic dialogue and engagement. Nkrumah studied at Lincoln University; there are notes of W. E. B. Du Bois coming to Ghana. There has always been this generative exchange that, for me, is about shared knowledge, but also the pursuit of new ways of thinking. It was good to have Dominique as someone who was able to structure those things, to ask what people here need, and what the inferences of change that are possible are.
RS: Working with those artisans in Tema – these dialogues, this continued listening – these are really just the beginning of reshaping one’s ideas of what’s possible. And it’s crazy – the main statement that kept being said is: you would have never been able to do this in the so-called West, you would never be able to do this in New York, or L.A. The possibilities are endless when you touch soil. Those who came across water to come see this, whether from Europe or America, went back with ideas. The notion is you go, learn a lesson while being there, and bring that back to where it’s supposed to be “greener” on the other side.
KN: Extending this notion of transatlantic exchange, the exhibition enfolds the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade insofar as your creation of ‘portals’ references the movement of bodies, but also earthly transcendence – a communion with the spiritual, or ancestral realm. Something I found really fascinating was that it’s less common for this theme to be explored without some recourse to bodies of water.
RS: I’m highly inspired by the scriptures, which speak about water being the word, water being a thing that will transform you. I’m always thinking about the spirit before anything else. What kind of spiritual manifestation can I create – what kind of spiritual situation, or encounter, can I inhabit by making the work? The work’s supposed to meet our people first, in that way. I guess when I’m thinking about water, I want these works to allow a washing away of past traumas, past things. Even when I’m making the work, there’s a lot of the usage of water – in washing the surface of the rubber, for instance.
DSP: I think, in the transatlantic slave trade, the notion of the body as it relates to labour is completely fractured. On both sides, the Black body is reoriented to become a product and something meant to produce. I don’t think you can untether that from the labour that has gone into the construction of these buildings. The conceptual reality of the work is that it’s a critique of the nation, but also a voice from within this colonial regime, as well. All of these histories are intrinsically bound up with each other, and that’s been the theoretical underpinning of water – the middle passage has contorted and reconstructed how we think about labour.
KN: I wanted to pick up on this point of labour, as it pertains to industry. A driving force within your practice is the exploration of the histories of industrial material. You’re now based in New York, but you come from Jacksonville, North Carolina, which possesses a strong manufacturing industry specialising in steel, machining, and tactical equipment. To what extent has your cultural awareness of such industries growing up come to bear on your practice, and what was the process of translating, or exploring some of these equivalent material histories in Ghana throughout your residency?
RS: Growing up, I had no real relationship to industrial anything. My father was a designer; a lot of my uncles on my mom’s side, from the Midwest, were fishermen, and they were carpenters. My great, great uncles on my father’s side worked at a rubber mill in Mississippi. Growing up, these kinds of things were all around me – but I didn’t really start picking apart this idea of labour, of metalworking and the industrial complex, until I started getting into the meat and potatoes of the work that I’ve been making for the past two to three years. Having conversations with my father, he’d bring up rubber and the industrialisation of it, and now I’m looking at those histories of the Congolese and King Leopold III. It started to give some historical footing to the materials that I was using.
I’m still coming to terms with some of these things from the past. I’m continuing to unpack these relationships, whether it be from a family front, a historical front, or a diasporic front. When I first started making the sculptures here in Connecticut, I felt detached from the process. There’s definitely a very different connectivity in terms of how they were made in Ghana. There’s something very different when there are hands from the diaspora working, welding, crafting and building alongside a mind that is connected to that same history; it’s deeper than just finding somebody to get the job done. The spirit of Tema is in those works, and people can see it – a dealer, a friend that I work with, kept saying, “There’s something magical about those gates in Ghana.” It’s because they were made in Tema. They would be very different if they were made anywhere else.
KN: You mentioned the rubber plantations. The paintings make use of this EPDM rubber, which speaks to Western Ghana’s colonial rubber industry. Grounding this materiality back in the physical exhibition, I wanted to ask about the incredible nuance of the paintings’ pictorial fields, in contrast to the sculptures. The sculptures are very much interventions in the space, but the paintings function differently – they cling to the walls, are nestled in the recesses. Could you talk about this interplay of the more obtrusive, larger forms, punctuated by these quieter moments?
RS: When I first started this body work using EPDM rubber, I called them “offerings.” The earlier bodies of work that I’ve made, the earlier abstractions, were all about energy, about projecting something. I wanted the offering paintings to do the opposite; I wanted them to function by way of absorbing pain, anguish, anxiety – to have a quiet intensity to them. For the viewer to charge and pour into the works, where they can walk away feeling lighter. So when you say that they feel like quieter work, you’re right. The paintings are meant to whisper and echo throughout the space.
What I pulled from the visual language of the industrial landscape is oxidisation, drips, washings; these beautiful instances of grunge. It was great to be able to put works in a space that felt like they belonged in; I’m so used to putting paintings into big white spaces or whatnot. I’ll let this transition to Diallo speaking about the sculptures, because he was a big part of pushing my thinking on how they could function beyond what I initially intended them to be – we wanted them to create great tension in the space and operate in a very different way than the paintings.
DSP: I began by thinking about the language of Reggie’s removals and reveals in the canvas. You’ll see slits at different points in the aluminium stretchers; these crescent-like cuts and removals from the rubber that, for me, are the same exact gesture, and experimentation of form that the sculptures then produce. You’re revealing this underside of the wall that the painting is hanging over, so then the question becomes, how do the sculptures do the same thing? I wanted to push the transition that those cuts and removals take you through, as a movement practice. How can we ask sculpture to squeeze, to reveal; how can it position, and ask you to take different paths?
KN: I feel like this crescent motif is so generative, if we’re thinking about portals, or this notion of circular time. There’s an inherent generosity within the repetition of this form – but it’s also a representation of absence. And that’s something that I think a lot about, is how to allude to things such as colonial legacies, without recourse to explicitly violent imagery. There’s this balance between presence and vacancy within the show that does this so beautifully – I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit more.
RS: I like to think of myself coming from the lanes of someone like Raymond Saunders, who spoke about not giving so much of ourselves away to an industry we don’t control or own. I wanted to use minimalism and abstraction, and brutalism as a way to be present yet absent. There’s just enough for you to take something away from, but there’s also this absence that I think can only really be engaged with, to a certain extent, if you come from the diaspora.
One thing we also wanted to get across with this show is these sightlines – these forms folding on top of each other, where you’ll see something, but also, if you stand from a different perspective, that sightline will dissipate. Making work that can literally play with that idea of presence – and there are layers to that in terms of who we are and where we come from.
KN: Building upon that, I’m drawn to the idea of the ruin as a curatorial and architectural practice, and something that feeds into the creation of the work. Our typical conceptualisation of the ruin is an extant building that’s left to degrade following its declining use, but Limbo flips this on its head by working with incomplete buildings. There’s a poetry in the fact that these sites never had the chance to decline, in a typical sense, because they were abandoned. This becomes interesting when you think about the role of memory or memorialisation; what you’re putting into the space, and the legacies that you’re contending with.
DSP: A lot of people would walk into the space and ask when it would be finished. It’s projecting this very Western understanding of completeness and finiteness. When we walked into the building, it was complete for us already. There’s immense poetry in that, and this reframe also enables us to think more critically about transitions of government powers and how that may also affect the notion of the ruin. How our own particular contexts define what is in, or has been left for, ruin. I think of the work of organisations like Forensic Architecture, who have redefined, or contributed towards, our spatial understanding of ruin.
That becomes the exciting part, the provocation of it. Different people at different moments ascribe their notion of ruin onto the space. That’s always the first thing that happens, and I feel like that’s very rare for an exhibition. Almost every single person that walks in the space immediately has an opinion, not of the work or the show, but of the place – and that’s the best, most generative part. From there, you get to dance with that reaction.
KN: This is maybe the perfect segue for my concluding question. When I was reading around this praxis of ruin, something that emerged was Limbo’s vision of ‘Afro utopian spatial justice for all’. I wanted to end with what that means for you – what hope you have of this, or what the achievement of this might look like?
RS: My hope is for us to all slow down. Leaving Ghana, I felt recharged and uplifted by the spirit and the resilience of the people that I got to meet and work with while being there. We need to have more faith, more patience with one another, and not let the incredible ideals of those who wanted more for us, coming from the past, go to waste. We need to pick up where these leaders left off and continue to build; to slow down, so we can see each other in another light, and the greatness in ourselves.
DSP: I’m Cape Verdean – Kriolu on my dad’s side, Kriolu-Portuguese on my mum’s. I’ve lived in New York and am now living in Brooklyn. I’ve seen different definitions of ruin and what the built environment has left us across all of these geographies. I want the work that we’re doing at the Museum to really operate as a precedent for people, to [think] okay, how can we think through our built environments, and rework and rewire. I just hope that people can feel emboldened to reach out and ask questions around this series of provocations, and how we can make better use of what’s around us.
