The Biennale of Ouidah dedicated to Voodoo arts and cultures is an event at the crossroads of contemporary artistic creations and scientific research. Ritual ceremonies, documentary screenings, concerts and scientific days punctuate the program. Meeting with Lilly Houngnihin, director of Laboratorio Contemporary Arts, which runs the Biennale.
RFI: You have been executive director of the Laboratorio Arts Contemporains since 2013. Can you tell us about this platform?
Lilly Houngnihin: It is an intercontinental platform for implementing cooperation projects in the field of cultural and creative industries. We have three sub-regional offices: one in Benin since 2010, a headquarters in Switzerland and since 2014, an office in Haiti. In general, we work a lot on the mobility of artists with projects that take place in West Africa, Europe, or the Caribbean and which involve artists who question the major crises that are shaking our societies.
What do the terms Voodoo arts and cultures cover?
When Laboratorio Arts Contemporains was created by Silvana Moï Virchaux in 2010, we decided to put ourselves at the intersection of scientific research and contemporary artistic creation. Vodun is a strong identity marker for Beninese. And we are not talking about the esoteric religious meaning of vodoun which has been the most popularized. For us, voodoo is a way of thinking, a whole civilizational system which effectively includes a religious axis, but which also carries a particular aesthetic.
As Beninese, we bathe in vodoun. From birth, there are rituals which are applied to you and which make you, on a greater or lesser scale, someone who is aware of the vodun aesthetic. When we talk about Voodoo arts and cultures, it’s all this aesthetics and these ways of thinking transmitted from generation to generation.
This aesthetic, artistic metadata, in terms of know-how, life skills, language, traveled with the deportation of blacks during the slave trade and spread to the Caribbean, Haiti, Cuba and Brazil. From this spin-off, there are aesthetic codifications that have been added to what is sourced from our African countries. This Biennial is therefore a way of bringing together all these ways of thinking and bringing them back here to discuss the challenges of these questions today.
What are the stakes of voodoo today and of its circulation precisely?
What scientific, theoretical or practical work has been done on vodoun? What are the issues related to the popularization of vodoun today? What modes of dialogue can we initiate with the populations who hold this heritage? I am talking about the communities that work daily to preserve and pass on this heritage to future generations. These are some of the questions we are trying to answer during this Biennale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg1v4cVbwtA
Also with a whole artistic component.
We receive artists from Haiti such as Erol Josué, from the national ethnology office and who is himself a hougan, Pascale Monnin who is a Swiss-Haitian visual artist, Ivonne Gonzalez who is a Cuban-Swiss musician, lawyer and activist, Bonbon Vaudou a French music group, etc. We have tried to bring together in Ouidah the widest possible connection of artists and intellectuals who are inspired by the vodoun aesthetic. Put them in conversation in this sacred place, the Palace of the Supreme Voodoo Chief, which is also a sacred place for most Afro-descendant voodoo practitioners. We also offer a retrospective of films made on vodoun, with a cycle notably around the works of Charles Najman, who filmed the first biennial dedicated to vodoun which took place in 1992 in Ouidah. We also give a large place to the emerging scene of Benin like Valdo Idaël and his music therapy or Koudy Fagbemi who is in the heritage of Yoruba musical know-how. The BIM group (Benin International Musical) will close the biennial.
In what consists, in the continuity of the Biennale, the project of creation of a cultural center. Can you tell us about it?
The question of creating a resource center is linked to a problem that we observe in Africa. Oral sources, which for most Africans constitute intellectual and historiographical references, are not legitimized in contemporary research. There is a sort of underestimation of the scientific quality of oral sources. It is for this reason that we have decided to organize the scientific days in Ouidah in the court of the supreme chief of the voodoo, to put in interaction the researchers and the voodoo community holding non-transcribed metadata.
The medium-term project to create a resource center on Voodoo arts and cultures first responds to this initial injunction to begin advocacy work to legitimize oral sources in research on Voodoo. The second issue is memory. It is important that we can have here on site a place with reliable documentary references for anyone interested in vodoun. You are not unaware that vodoun has been much criticized in literature, in the cinema, in the arts. “We are afraid of vodoun”, “it’s witchcraft”… All that, for lack of information. Hence the challenge of building a center of documentary resources.