Michelle Eistrup Portfolios

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DIKENGA: CROSSROADS & MINDFUL MOVEMENTS - dem defy silence.

In connection with the Fisk/Belmont Social Justice Collaborative, Fisk’s campus is adorned with flags depicting Bakongo-inspired movements and gestures made by community members. These gestures are pathways to leverage Afro-diasporic culture that can convey complex messages or express intricate states of mind. The flags call upon the spirit of the ancestors: Echoing diasporic knowledge systems and creating mechanisms—perhaps subconsciously—to resist increasingly grim or dangerous political conditions.

The dozen different gestures displayed at Fisk originate from Bakongo culture in Central Africa and are hundreds if not thousands of years old. Because of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Bakongo culture is pervasive throughout the Americas, with signs and symbols inscribed on African American pottery in the Carolinas, in Haitian, Caribbean and Brazilian religions, and in burial practices adopted by African-descendant people worldwide. As an emotional alphabet, Bakongo gestures express joy, respect, sorrow, spirituality, and welcome. They summon ancestral memory and “re-memories” (in the words of Toni Morrison) that can guide our way into the future. The gestures have been re-enacted and revitalized by the extended Fisk community, including teachers, students, staff and others.

At the same time, the placement of the flags utilizes Fisk’s campus layout to form an invisible Dikenga (Crossroads) sign—the central symbol of Bakongo cosmology—which represents the cyclical nature of night and day (darkness and light; spirit world and physical world) as well as the life cycle: from the unborn to the learner, the fully developed individual, and finally, the elder preparing to transition.

As Fisk University Aaron Douglas Fellow and artistic creator Michelle Eistrup explains in verse and poetry: “These are not just symbols. They are living movements. Many of these gestures are more common and a part of our memory and everyday life than we can imagine.”

As di flags rise, dem defy silence.
Dem whisper, dem roar, dem call.
We deh yah. We always deh yah.
Di breeze carry we story forward.
May dem gestures remind we, who we be, weh we come from, an’ weh we a go.
May dem stand strong, proof of we presence, we resilience, an’ di journey dat never done.

Give thanks.

FOOTNOTES/REFERENCES

Michelle Eistrup: Dikenga - Four Faces of the Sun, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (Nashville, TN: 2023).

Ricardo Guthrie: “Confederates and Colonial Commemoration in the United States: Collective Memory and Counter-histories,” The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Ferrelly, eds. (Palgrave-Macmillan: 2023).

Cedric Robinson: Forgeries of Memory & Meaning, (UNC Press: 2008).

Acknowledgments

Eistrup wishes to thank the following participants in images:

Dancers: Thea Jones, Shabaz Ujima, Audra Lafayette
Community Members: Pastor Eloise Freeman, Professor Persephone Felder-Fentress, Dean Adrienne Latham, Professor James Pratt
Fisk Students: Henry Alumona, Frank Inyiama, Mya Banks, Brooke Franklin, Neveah Gay, Albert Long, Camron Williams,
Vanderbilt Students: Jaila Williams, Qwynn Foster

Eistrup also extends gratitude to:

Dr. Robert Carr, Professor Ricardo Guthrie, Veronica Kizer, Dr. James Pratt, Adrienne Latham, Professor Magdalena Campos Pons, Professor Lakesha Calvin, Prof. Jamaal Sheats, Anders Juhl, Marlen Lugo, Linda Fox, Anna Bolin, and Stephanie Gomez.

Fisk Students: Cheryl Swanson, Frank Inyiama, Kelechi Nnorom, Seybanou Diallo, and Eric Newell.

dikenga_Four Faces of the Sun

Michelle Eistrup’s Four Faces of the Sun (2023) is a richly layered work centered around the ideology and symbolism of the Bakongo religion and the Kongo cosmogram, known as Dikenga. This large-scale multisensory installation builds upon Eistrup’s earlier work and her extensive research and interviews with renowned scholars, cultural anthropologists, and art historians. Here, she implements visual, sonic, and kinetic elements in a four-channel video installation that brings the spiritual language and power of Nkisi objects to life.

Stolen from Africa and dispersed throughout Western ethnographic museums, these artifacts (and what they represent spiritually) are also directly connected to the stories and heritage of African Americans living in the southern United States. In a continuation of Eistrup’s ongoing history lesson, she explores entangled colonial histories through a pared-down visual language that combines movement, dance, and music to convey themes ranging from respect and sorrow to honor, joy, and remembrance. The spiritual significance of Nkisi objects thereby comes to life visually and musically. With dance and movement at the core of this work, the wider implications of the movement of Black bodies takes on multiple layers of meaning—through history, across oceans, and between geographies.

As is often the case with Eistrup’s interdisciplinary approach to the shared cultural history of the Black Atlantic, Four Faces of the Sun connects bodies across geographies through objects, movement, and sound. The dramatic poses of the dancers, conceived in direct response to the Bakongo gestures that are symbolized in Nkisi figures, create a strong visual impact against the brightly colored red, yellow and blue backdrops. The work translates to a powerful visual reminder of the direct link between the capture and containment of African bodies and the theft and looting of African artifacts during the colonial era. One can almost hear the gentle whisper of ancestral voices in an extended scream from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

Positioned here, in the American south, on the Fisk University campus, at the very library that houses the original printing plates of W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal book The Souls of Black Folks, the work takes on additional nuance. These dancers are not simply performing, they are part of a crucial transition from passive observer (of a distant colonial past) to active participant (in a forceful decolonial strategy). As they move across the external facade of the Fisk University Library, they activate and mark a historical site, through gestures and movements that are ultimately linked to the forced displacement of Black bodies from Africa, across the Atlantic, and to the Americas.

Selene Wendt is an art historian, independent curator,
and writer based in Oslo. Her ongoing curatorial focus
is on decoloniality and socially engaged art practices,
with emphasis on interdisciplinary projects situated at
the intersection between contemporary art, music,
and literature. For more information, about her work
as a curator and writer please visit
www.theglobalartproject.no