Tracey Rose
Die Wit Man (2015)
Die Wit Man is the video recording of a journey Rose made on foot in Brussels, from WIELS Centre of Contemporary Art to the grave of Leopold II in the Royal Crypt at in the church of Our Lady of Laeken. ‘Die Wit Man’ is ‘The White Man’ in Afrikaans, the language derived from the Dutch settlers of South Africa which is, however, closer today to the Flemish of Belgium. In English Die Wit Man reads, obviously, as ‘die wit man’.
In 1526 King Nzinga Mbemba of Kongo, also titled Alfonso I of the Congo, wrote a pleading letter to King João III of Portugal, appealing to him to end the enslavement of his people as currency on the slave market and their torture and physical debasement by Portuguese officials. His requests went unheeded. Sometime later King Mbemba survived an assassination attempt in which two of his accompanying noblemen were killed.
Die Wit Man is a call to order: for those who have passed beyond this realm into the next, a call to those who in their untimely deaths – many at the instigation of the CIA – would have induced change. It is an adjustment of the frequency vibration of fear and hate. In Zulu there is a word for breath, spirit ancestor, wind and air – ‘uMoya’. When one dies one becomes the wind, the air. We breathe in and out the spirits of the dead.
The totem of wood and branches are taken from a structure in Parc Duden, the park built for Leopold II's mistress in Brussels, which is now the location for a plant where industrial pine is burnt. The work is an effigy for the burnt tree, which is said to mark the buried remains of Patrice Lumumba.
The elements of Die Wit Man – which can also be translated as ‘The Funny Man’ – are a white Homer Simpson mask and a white ‘X’ on the reverse, a reference to the exhibition ‘X’ at Reina Sofia which Rose undertook in 2014. It is also a reference to the Saints Christopher who Rose has encountered in her life – various men by this name who are soldiers in her army and back-up dancers on her stage.