Africa Rifting - Lines of Fire, Namibia/Brazil 2001. Essay by Marta Silva Maria Mantovani Essay by Laurel Reuter Essay by Marta Silva Maria Mantovani Portuguese Version I first encountered Georgia Papageorge through an e-mail -an almost desperate appeal on my computer´s screen about the volcanic activity of basalt which preceded the Continental Drift between South America and Africa. It was signed by an artist and it came from South Africa. I was puzzled by the challenge - how to interpret the scientific doubts of a professional artist? It was the beginning of an intense exchange of messages: I came to appreciate the beauty and importance of the project in the hands of a very special, sensitive, perceptive and committed person, with a mind at once scientific and mystic. A profoundly religious woman of strict principles, but at the same time fatalistic: an interesting personality, and a challenge. For more than ten long years I had been working on this subject, which still fascinates me, and it was through scientific periodicals that Georgia had traced me. I live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean which was created by this geological process that took place more than a hundred and twenty million years ago; Georgia, who had already travelled in Namibia on various occasions, was familiar with the ocean´s other limits. Through her art she was searching for the link between the two coasts and I held the key to bridging the rift between art and science. The catalogue of her Kilimanjaro project, exhibited at Art First in London in 1998, and the photographs of the African segment of this new project, fascinated me. This material, which came to me by post, was ample evidence of her talent and potential. I had no doubt that the work on South America which still had to be done, should be carried out and combined with the almost completed work on Namibia. I immersed myself in this new venture, in a challenge which could not be denied. The starting point of the crusade was the choice of an ideal point for the marriage of the images of the two continents: two ´V´s which, brought together at their midpoint, would form an ´X´, symbol of a link which both separates and brings together the divided continents. A geological event which sounded so objective became a whirlpool of emotions in the abstract, reflecting the dichotomy of veering between the comprehensible and the enigmatic, between realism and mysticism, between causality and fatalism. For Georgia, that rupture signified a suffering, a loss, a violence, the end of an era. In the red hues of her fabrics blowing in the wind, imitating lava erupting through the fissures which formed the Continental Drift, Georgia saw blood pouring from torn entrails and the reflection of her own deep pain for a great loss. Yes, Torres was the ideal place! Torres, where solidified lava intermingled with the layers beneath, like those which Georgia had photographed in Namibia and which are perpetually washed by the salty waters of the Atlantic. Torres, a small and pretty town on the South American coastline, cheerful and noisy, in contrast to the rhythmic silence of the African desert. Once the decision was taken, the preparations for the journey began, and I was amazed to receive electronic correspondence in which some parts were in my own language of Portuguese! I was convinced that with her gift for communication, her determination and her dedication, Georgia would bring her project to a successful conclusion. Moreover, I felt responsible lest anything should go wrong on her travels in Brazil, and feared that my own enthusiasm had brought her to expect too much. I followed in her tracks. At the end of August 2001 I met her for the first time, in S?o Paulo, and had the sensation of having already known her for a long time! We laughed a lot, and went through the plans we had made over several months. I gave her my own ´objective´ pieces of the puzzle so that she could put them together with the pieces from her ´whirlpool of emotions´ to complete the picture. While she was in Torres, a telephone call in the late afternoon was our point of contact. As the days went by the weather deteriorated, and the humidity in the air dulled the sharpness of things and clouds marred the lighting. On 11 September day turned into night and in the darkness of the laden clouds, a squall belaboured the installation of red cloths on the beach, tearing them from their poles and mixing them with the sand, composing again the images of what had happened some hundred and twenty million years before... that same day I was in Brasilia, where I watched on television the Dantesque scene of the Trade Centre Towers. Coincidence or fate? Bearing out the saying ´calm after the storm´, a few days later the sun reappeared, to shine on the procession Georgia organised in Torres in memory of those who had died in New York on the fatal day. I had the privilege of being the first to see the film she made which shows the mystic side: the image of the rebirth, a new epoch after the rift, after simultaneous catastrophes in different places and in different forms. Coincidence or fate? Georgia returned to Brazil the following year to see again the many friends she had made during her short stay, and I had the privilege of taking in her by now almost completed project. I learned to appreciate her art which brought together her extraordinary creativity with her understanding of natural phenomena, and whose sensitivity is leavened by spirituality, faith and strong emotion. An enterprise powered by the challenge of a geological phenomenon shown as a work of art, and coming to fruition with the personification of an old friendship. Marta Silva Maria Mantovani Professora de Geofisica, IAG-USP Directora do Parque de Ciência e Tecnologia da Universidade de S?o Paulo S. Paulo, 8 January 2003 TOP Africa rifting - lines of fire, Namibia/Brazil Essay by Laurel Reuter Georgia Papageorge draws like an angel. Her line is sure, swift, and elegant. Inevitably the drawings appear in her exhibitions as ´working drawings´. Rather, I believe them to be summations, made by the artist at the end of a large body of work, incorporating all that has gone before. Once finished, the large-scale monumental drawings, laced with calligraphy and expanded with washes of paint and embedded photographs or objects, become singular works of art, more comprehensive and more mysterious than the photographic murals, the sculpture, the installations, and the videos from which they gather their substance. The multi-media works created en route to the drawings are not diminished by their existence but augmented, extended, and given layers of complexity that might not be readily apparent when seen singly. Like so many artists today, Papageorge is drawn to video. She looks to the medium to freeze her images, to solidify her ceremonies, to crystallize her ideas, and to feed the working drawings. Georgia Papageorge is deeply religious in a Catholic Christian way. This Christianity is not dogmatic but washed in a personal mysticism that allows her to hold beliefs and make connections unavailable to the more rational mind. For example, her African Rifting performance in the southern Brazilian town of Torres took place on September 11, 2001, a date seared into the international consciousness by the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City. Papageorge deeply believes that a mystical connection exists in the confluence of her performance on that day and the events in New York. It is also from this Catholic view of life that she takes her symbols: the circle, the cross, the processional. For much of her artistic career, her work has found its genesis in the physical world. Between 1980 and 1983 she created her first site installation, a political work, on the Western Deep Levels Gold Mine in the western Transvaal in South Africa. Then in 1983 she performed a ritual 8,000 feet underground at the Elandstrand Gold Mine in Carletonville, also in the western Transvaal. Subsequently, with gold as her metaphor, she spent the next ten years exploring her fractured South African society. Right after the elections in April 1994, Papageorge says, ´My work took a new direction. As peace came over my country, it came over me. I turned back to the desert and began my Gondwanaland Series.´ Her Gondwanaland work began with photographs, sketches and watercolours of the Baobab tree, an ancient presence in the deserts of sub-Sahara Africa where individual trees are believed to live up to 2,000 years. Huge bodies of work followed based in the Sowa Salt Pan in Botswana and the Great East African Rift Valley in Central Africa, the home of Kilimanjaro. These fabulous and demanding places became the workshop of her soul and the foundations for her art. Papageorge´s patterns of working do not seem like working at all, in the beginning. The artist sets out with her family by land vehicle or helicopter, north into the Kalahari Desert, scouting, sketching, watching the animals, camping for days at a time. The family goes off, leaving her alone under a tree, making small watercolours that later find their way into her monumental working drawings. She returns home to Pretoria and delves into geography and geology, into natural science looking for patterns for what she has observed, for relationships born of earlier times. During the years leading up to Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire, Papageorge continued to dwell, within the African land, drawn to Namibia. Drawn, in her own words, ´to the wonders of the desert scenery, like nothing else I have seen. Constantly changing landscape of awesome proportions. From coast, to dune, to one huge barren rocky mountain range after another, Namibia´s dry riverbeds form vast canyons. Volcanic dolerite dykes and just phenomenal rock structures everywhere. The eerie silence of the great dune fields. Torra Bay has three toilets on the beach and that is all. The place is primordial and totally remarkable and I know that I must work in the Torra Bay region of the Skeleton Coast, in the Etendeka lava region´. Africa Rifting gestated for years while the artist pursued the idea of Gondwanaland. From scientists she came to understand that this southern supercontinent was one of the most enduring features of our planet, formed after an earlier supercontinent, Pangaea, broke up during the Jurassic period (Pangaea comes from Greek, meaning ´all of Earth´). It included, what are now the lands of South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica. Her mature work has always involved schisms, be it the geological coming apart of a continent or the political suicide of her own South Africa. Then, through ceremony, she seeks to bridge those vast chasms. Before the elections in South Africa, she organized ceremonial events in Squatter´s Camps to symbolize her dream for a healed, undivided country. Both the black and the white participants seemed equally moved by their coming together through art and song. In Africa Rifting, the artist seeks to bridge the vast water - the Atlantic Ocean - that rends an ancient continent, Gondwanaland. She began in June 2001 on the African Coast with a ceremony on the great dunes of Namibia, one of the most spectacular landscapes on earth. Then, by crossing the Atlantic to Brazil for a second ceremony, she sought to transcend the barrier imposed by nature in the long forgotten past. In her own words, ´In relatively low wind conditions in the early morning, a long line of red banners bled down and across the basaltic lava towers at the beach at Guaritas. This kind of sacrificial Genesis reaches a full Crucifixion during the cross installation on the afternoon of the 11th September...´ Again Papageorge turns to the Bible for language to understand the context of her performance. Research, intertwined with emotional response, is the foundation of Papageorge´s art. Or is it ceremony, used to give voice to belief and emotion, that is the bedrock of her art? In order to create her body of work on Kilimanjaro, she had to climb that mountain, but not before several reconnoitering trips and fixed-wing and helicopter flights. Using her signature banners, chevrons, ladders, circles, and poles, she photographed the mountain overlaid with her symbols, seeking a visual expression of transcendence. Papageorge makes contemporary art about states of spiritual being. The landscape, itself the greatest spiritual presence of all, provides both the platform and the substance. One wonders, where will her attention turn next? One also wonders, were she not born of Africa, what would her art have been, for seldom does a magnificent landscape lead to such magnificence. Laurel Reuter (Director North Dakota Museum of Art) April 2003 TOP