7 - Imaging and Imagining ‘Vanished lives of the black diaspora’ in Venetian Maps (1997)

Summary

‘Venice though is also a symbol for me to how people of the black diaspora have for centuries been the backbone of the cultural development of many European cities but that this presence is invisible’, observes Lubaina Himid. She exposes centuries of social, political, historical and cultural injustices: ‘That such a visible set of people, there because they were used as slaves and signifiers of European wealth, could be so invisible in the discussions around the origins of patterns and architectural forms of the countries from which they came has always been a continuing preoccupation of mine’. Warring against white supremacist erasures of a very real Black presence in every area of national, political, social and cultural life, she is under no illusion that ‘Venice looks like it does because Venetians were impressed by North African/Arabic culture its richness and sophistication its intricacy and its colour and spectacular shifting moving symbolism’. Working to represent, recreate and reimagine denied and distorted traditions of African diasporic artistry, she was inspired to create Venetian Maps, ‘a series of paintings that illustrated this hidden culture that was incredibly influential but never discussed in general touristic guide book conversation’. Again, as per Plan B and her Toussaint I and II series, she chose not to create her nine acrylic paintings in isolation. Rather, she produced ‘a series of texts (now lost) depicting the vanished lives of the black diaspora, the unwritten but intensely experienced narratives of the everyday’. While we no longer have access to her disappeared textual narratives, all of the nine large-scale paintings which Himid created in 1997 survive: Ceramicists, Masks, Miracles, Shoemakers, Lost Toys, Reliquaries, Birdcages, Goblets & Dolphins and Kings.

Working to visibilise an ‘invisible presence’ and a ‘hidden culture’, Himid takes heart and hope in her paintings: ‘everything is there, from the simple yet long lost misery of lost toys to the unrecognised contribution to western culture’. No histories or biographies are off-limits. She transgresses boundaries of class and legal divisions in society to represent ‘the rescuers of dropped relics, slave servants as gondoliers, royal princes on their way across the world, merchants buying and selling, black artisans adapting their craft to suit the location and the tastes of Europe’.