Maisons Tropicales/Maisons Coloniales: contesting technologies of authenticity and value in Niamey, Brazzaville, Paris, New York and Venice

Abstract

This article draws on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork to analyse institutional practices of producing cultural authenticity and value under conditions of globalization. It focuses on the ‘re-discovery’ of three so-called Maisons Tropicales as modern architectural heritage in Niamey and Brazzaville. These prototypes of a colonial building project were subsequently translocated, commoditized and displayed as modern works of art in Paris and New York. The article describes the global connections and disconnections between the actors involved, claiming that the alternative practices of appropriating the Maisons Tropicales rely on competing and conflicting technologies of authenticity and value. Adding to scholarship on exchanges of material culture, as well as on the production of cultural authenticity and value, the article reframes debates in heritage studies pertaining to the ethics of site-specificity, material integrity, and integrity of place; preservation, conservation, and restoration; restitution and repatriation; as well as questions of cultural identity and the notion of a ‘shared’ colonial heritage. Ultimately, the article re-contextualizes the Maisons Tropicales in their (post-)colonial legacies. It concludes that critical interjections by artists and ethnographers suggest potential to reassemble the dominant technologies of authenticity and value in the fields of art and heritage preservation.

Keywords:

• Global Heritage Assemblages
• Technologies of Authenticity and Value
• Contemporary Art and Culture Collecting
• Modern Architectural Heritage
• Africa

In 1993, the French government commissioned research on the colonial architecture of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. Three years later, the project yielded a heritage inventory featuring photographs of two so-called Maisons Tropicales, prototypes of a mid-twentieth century pre-fabricated building project by the French architect Jean Prouvé. Prouvé’s original design of standardised aluminium modules could construct colonial buildings ranging from expeditionary shelters to school complexes. Besides the name Maisons Tropicales, he had given his modular building system other designations, such as Maisons Equatoriales, Maisons Africaines, and – initially – Maisons Coloniales.

In 1949, Prouvé’s Nancy based company Maxeville first shipped prototype modules via air-cargo to Niamey, then the capital of the French colony of Niger. There, the separate parts were assembled to serve as a home for colonial officials (Illustration 1). Two years later, the two Brazzaville Maisons Tropicales followed suit as demonstration models to acquire government contracts (Illustration 2). However, in the wake of political decolonisation in French West Africa, Prouvé’s project came to a halt. Afterwards, the prototype Maisons Tropicales saw half a century of local use for purposes of accommodation and commerce until their ‘re-discovery’ as modern architectural heritage, which happened to coincide with art market excitement around Prouvé’s modern industrial design at the turn of the twentieth century.

Illustration 1. The Niamey prototype Maison Tropicale shortly after construction. Copyright: Gallerie 54.

Illustration 2. The Brazzaville Maisons Tropicales. Copyright: Gallerie 54.

Soon, an American collector commissioned a French gallery owner to remove Prouvé’s Maisons Tropicales as ‘collector’s items’. In 2001, they dismantled the houses in Niamey and Brazzaville, shipping them to France for restoration as art objects – despite calls from the French Ministry of Culture, as well as the UNESCO World Heritage Centre to preserve them in situ as cultural heritage. Currently, one of the Maisons Tropicales is on loan to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2007 Christie’s in New York sold a second house for ca. $5 million. The third prototype remains in gallery ownership.

In this article, I draw on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork to compare and contrast powerful institutional practices of producing cultural authenticity and value under conditions of globalisation. My focus is on the practices governing the ‘re-discovery’ of the Maisons Tropicales (MT) as modern architectural heritage on the one hand, as well as on their translocation, commoditisation and display as modern works of art on the other hand. Analysing the global connections and disconnections between the various actors involved, I claim that these different practices rely on competing and conflicting technologies of authenticity and value. I add to scholarship on exchanges of material culture, as well as on the production of authenticity and value in the fields of art and cultural heritage (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Clifford 1988; Thomas 1991; Gell 1994; Marcus and Myers 1995; Clifford 1997; Price 1989; Lowenthal 1997; Jokiletho 1999; Breglia 2006; Smith 2006; Price 2007).

Considering the contested authenticities and values of the MT, I re-evaluate contemporary norms and forms of collecting objects of art and culture in terms of their distinctions between tradition and modernity. What does it mean to inherit established institutions of modernity (Latour 1993; Rabinow 2003), such as modern architecture and urban-planning, but also art and cultural heritage preservation? I show that when the MT are approached as modern architectural heritage to be internationally protected and locally preserved, this is problematically reminiscent of certain colonial exchanges of culture. I also argue that the transnational appropriation of the MT as works of modern art transforms them into a problematic kind of trophy, not unlike collections of primitive art during colonial times.

In the wake of these arguments, my article contributes to longstanding debates relevant to the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies. In fact, the present case study of the ‘re-discovery’, translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT reframes questions pertaining to the ethics of site-specificity, material integrity, and integrity of place (Jokiletho 1999); preservation, conservation, and restoration (Choay 2001); restitution and repatriation (Cuno 2010; van Beurden 2015); as well as questions of cultural identity (Appadurai 1986; Kaplan 1996; Boym 2001; Anderson 2006) and the notion of a ‘shared’ colonial heritage (ICOMOS 2001).

Ultimately, I aim to re-contextualise the MT in their (post-)colonial legacies. To this end, I reflect on an installation-artwork about the MT by the Portuguese artist Ângela Ferreira, together with an accompanying documentary movie by the Malinese ethnographer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara. Jointly, these works open critical perspectives not only on the transitory existence of the MT, but also on the contingency of the corresponding art and heritage practices. I conclude claiming that critical interjections by artists and ethnographers suggest potential to reassemble dominant technologies of authenticity and value in the fields of art and heritage preservation, today.

Technologies of authenticity and value

When I refer to technologies of authenticity and value in this article, I draw on the sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s definition of technology as functional simplification and differentiation, a form of reduction of complexities enabling the self-description of contemporary society. For Luhmann, technologies make ‘observations on modernity’ possible in the form of first- or second-order observations. First-order observations are ordinary realist attempts to describe the world, ways of grasping a referent by establishing a context and assuming a specific perspective on it – which is what most actors in the social world are content to do (Luhmann 1998, 2000, 2008). For example, Alfred Gell’s ‘art cult’ (1994), David Lowenthal’s ‘cult of heritage’ (1997), and Laurajane Smith’s ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (2006) describe what Luhmann would consider technologies of authenticity and value informed by first order observations.

Luhmannian second-order observations, then, are observations of first-order observations: meta-observations that take given first-order observations as their referent, making it possible to reflect on certain blind spots resulting from the necessary arbitrariness of the first-order observers’ choice of perspective. While first-order observations are directed at one limited context – e.g. conventions of art or cultural heritage – second-order observations consider more than one context. Speaking with Luhmann, second-order observations include the observation of observers observing a context, as well as the fact that they are observing them (Luhmann 1998, 2000, 2008).

Luhmann believes that the dominant technologies of cultural authenticity and value that characterise present-day conceptions of modernity are governed by first-order observations shaped in a European tradition (1998). But, he largely neglects the colonial and post-colonial legacies of this tradition, which matter significantly – certainly in the present case of the MT. The anthropologist James Clifford explicitly does trace those legacies (1988, 1997). Like Luhmann, Clifford describes a system of art, culture and authenticity, which he presents as a complex where cultural description is shown to proceed from contested assumptions about temporality, wholeness and continuity – assumptions that I will proceed to analyse in relation to the case of the MT. Clifford refers to his ‘art-culture-authenticity system’ as a historical and political machine to create authenticity and value (1988, 224). He too is interested in what Luhmann refers to as technologies of authenticity and value, particularly those that depend on the opposition between tradition and modernity.¹

For example, in On Collecting Art and Culture Clifford’s focus is on the appropriation of traditional objects of material culture from the European colonies as so-called ‘primitive art’ (1988). Modern histories of colonialism abound with the colonisers’ appropriations of other cultures. Initially, such appropriations either took the form of scientific inventory, or of the actual removal of material culture as trophies and for display in ethnographic collections. Subsequently, also art museums began to celebrate a ‘primitive’ aesthetic. By the mid-twentieth century, the display of primitive art, out of time and out of context, had made an enormous impact on the development of avant-garde art in the West (Marcus and Myers 1995). Western artists began to reflect on the appropriation and display of primitive art objects as observations on modernity in their own right. Following Clifford though, these approaches continued to rely on a limited set of technologies of authenticity and value (1988).

In Primitive Art in Civilised Places Sally Price agrees with Clifford, describing ‘the plight of objects from around the world that […] have been discovered, seized, commoditised, stripped of their social ties, redefined in new settings and reconceptualised to fit the economic, cultural, political and ideological needs of people from distant societies’ (1989, 5). Price identifies five dimensions of Western control over the authenticity and value of primitive art: First, the acclaim of a given object as primitive art tends to rely exclusively on the Western observer’s discriminating eye. Second, Western collectors and institutions ignore local circumstances and act largely according to their own, limited priorities when engaging with primitive art. Third, Western connoisseurs assign themselves the job of interpreting the meaning and significance of artistic objects produced by peoples they regard as less equipped to perform the task. Fourth, Western experts employ considerable financial and communicative resources to bestow international artistic recognition and value on their personal favourites from the world of primitive craftsmanship. Fifth and finally, Price notes how Westerners are successful in determining the re-production of primitive art in virtually every corner of the world (1989, 68–69).

Clifford’s and Price’s analyses describe Western practices of collecting, classifying, and circulating primitive art that Luhmann would regard as first order observations on modernity, amounting to powerful technologies of functional simplification and differentiation. In defining the authenticity and value of primitive art, these technologies highlight the opposition between tradition and modernity as a simple problem of cultural difference. Yet, Clifford believes that such ‘generous appropriations’ of Western categories as primitive art are gradually losing much of their stability (1988, 235–236). In fact, he emphasises the transience of the art-culture-authenticity system: in the late twentieth century collecting art and culture inevitably took place in ‘a changing field of counterdiscourses, syncretisms and re-appropriations originating both inside and outside the West’ (1988, 236).

Consequently, Clifford aims to situate cultural relations in a so-called ‘contact zone’ (1997) where ‘fundamental assumptions about relationships themselves – notions of exchange, justice, reciprocity – may be topics of struggle and negotiations’, or, in other words, subject to Luhmannian second order observations (1988, 236). Ultimately, Clifford argues, any art-culture-authenticity system must operate as a historically specific and contestable field of meanings and institutions (1988, 1997). But what exactly happens when established technologies of authenticity and value are globally contested today?

The Maisons Tropicales: modern architectural heritage vs. modern art

When the European colonisers arrogated themselves to be the rightful custodians of primitive art and culture, they considered modern architecture as an instrument of civilisation and an effective development tool. The colonisers introduced modern regimes of building construction in exchange for the scientific inventory, collection and display of traditional objects (AlSayyad 1992). It was assumed that the progressive nature of the modern built environment would emancipate the colonial population, a utopia which implied that living in a modern house – or living by colonial institutions – would make a civilised person (Holston 1989; Rabinow 1989; Fuller 2007). Under colonialism, modern architecture and urban planning were means to appropriate territory and effectively rule over the indigenous population too (AlSayyad 1992). In this respect, the former African colonies constituted significant fields of architectural experimentation – and Jean Prouvé’s Maisons Tropicales (MT) were no exception.

Though Prouvé had started testing modular designs for building construction in France in the 1920s, he quickly turned his attention to the French colonies in Africa – and not only as a source of raw materials for his aluminium fabrications. In the late 1930s, he offered his MT modules to build shelters for the French colonial troops, and in the early 1940s to construct schools as well as administrative buildings for the corps of engineers (Cinqualbre 2009) (Illustrations 3 and 4). However, it was not until 1948 that Paul Herbé, town planner to the colonial authorities in French West Africa, presented Prouvé with an opportunity to test his prefabrication system in practice, suggesting that ‘all possible interest should be shown, for a region so remote and deprived of transport, in the total contribution by metropolitan industry for pre-manufactured lightweight alloy materials’ (Guilloux 2008, 10–11).

Illustration 3. The modular building system in expedition-hut configuration. Copyright: Institute Francaise d’Architecture, Fonds Le Corbusier/Pictoright.

Illustration 4. Drawing for a projected school building in Ouagadougou. Copyright: Institute Francaise d’Architecture, Fonds Le Corbusier/Pictoright.

Pre-fabrication was imperative to Prouvé, because according to him:

an exhausting climate breaks the initial fighting spirit, and this does not encourage the ‘building’ process. And yet, an acceptable dwelling must be given to a man who has to live and work under difficult conditions: to create an ‘environment’ from the new requirements. (Guilloux 2008, 10–11)

In fact, Prouvé was very much aware of the ‘requirements’ of French colonial rule. He took it for granted that ‘the Europeans will try to off-load most maintenance duties, hard or special, onto the natives’ (Guilloux 2008, 10–11). Prouvé engaged in a classical colonial project (King 1995), which is why it is unsurprising that his very first drawings were titled designs for a series of Maisons Coloniales. Only later did he come up with the dominant designation of the project today, Maisons Tropicales.

But, despite Prouvé’s lobbying for the realisation of his large-scale commissions in Niamey, which included the main government building as well as law courts, only one prototype of Prouvé’s modular series was built there for demonstration purposes in 1949. And although the state-owned company Aluminium Francaise installed two more houses in Brazzaville in 1951, this did not have the anticipated promotional effect either. Apparently, Prouvé’s design proved suited for the specific climatic conditions, but the aluminium modules were too expensive for broader implementation (von Vegesack 2005; Bergdoll and Christensen 2008; Cinqualbre 2009).

After independence of the Niger and the Congo in 1957 and 1960 respectively, the MT received little attention in Western histories of modern architecture and industrial design. Local inhabitants, however, used the buildings for accommodation and business purposes. One of the Brazzaville Maisons served as a copy shop and the Niamey house provided shelter for poor residents. Nevertheless, the MT were said to be ‘forgotten’ or ‘long lost’ to the West until their so-called ‘re-discovery’ in the wake of a French heritage mission (Gordon 2004).

In 1993, the French Ministry of Foreign Cooperation co-funded research on the built heritage of Brazzaville. It commissioned Bernard Toulier, a senior expert on 20th-century built heritage for the French Ministry of Culture, to research the colonial architecture of what was later called Brazzaville’s ‘European sector’ (Rose 2008a). One reason for the French government’s interest in Brazzaville’s modern architectural heritage was the internationally perceived need to register and preserve colonial heritage as ‘shared heritage’ at-risk (ICOMOS 2001). But, the French also regarded modern architecture in their former colonies as a distinctly ‘national’ inheritance. After all, Bernard Toulier’s research reports were to appear in the Inventaire Général des Monuments et Richesses Artistiques de la France.

In 1996, Toulier published Brazzaville Decouvertes and Brazzaville la Verte (1996a, 1996b) featuring photographs of Prouvé-designed buildings including the MT (Illustration 5). Coinciding with hype around 20th-century industrial design on the global art market where Prouvé furniture and fixtures came to be sold for tens- and sometimes hundreds of thousands of US$, the publications immediately led to the removal of Prouvé objects from the former French colonies in Africa and, finally, the removal of the MT. In fact, after noticing the two Parisian gallerists Philippe Joussee and Patrick Seguin successfully selling Prouvé objects from Brazzaville (Joussee and Seguin 1998), the American investor Robert Rubin had ‘the idea of perhaps repatriating the houses themselves’, calling it ‘a daunting prospect for both political and financial reasons, but nonetheless an idea whose time would eventually come’ (Rubin 2009, 117).

Illustration 5. At the Brazzaville Maison Tropicales in 1996. Copyright: Bernard Renoux.

Acclaimed as a ‘born collector with the zeal of a scholar’ (Gordon 2004), Rubin credits his initiative to get the MT out of Africa as much to his impulses – ‘the basic competitive collector’s urge to own the coolest Prouvé piece’ (Armstrong 2006) – as to his realisation of the historical significance of Jean Prouvé’s pre-fabricated architecture. He told me during an interview in Paris in September 2009:

It is true, my original impulse to buy the house was a collector’s impulse. […] So well, I said one time: wouldn’t it be great to get this house out? […] And there was a dealer […]. And, yeah, he said it’s my dream to get these houses out, but of course it’s a question of finances. So I said here you go and he went there and got them out.

The dealer that Rubin refers to as his collaborator is Eric Touchaleaume. Touchaleaume owns the Gallerie 54 in Paris, where he sells exclusive modern furniture and industrial design. In fact, the Guardian calls Touchaleaume the Indiana Jones of furniture collecting and the New York Times mentions him ‘scouring the former French colonies – including Cameroon, Niger and Morocco – for two decades in search of lost Modernist works’ (Gordon 2004). Touchaleaume is reported as ‘salvaging’ (Rose 2008a) many tables and chairs from Algeria shortly before engaging with the MT, which he called his ‘holy grail’ (Gordon 2004).²

Touchaleaume describes the process leading to the acquisition, dismantling and removal of the MT from both Brazzaville and Niamey to France as follows:

Six months of endless talks, joys, disappointments, dirty tricks, meetings with some amazing people and some vile ones, and lastly, our heads filled with fabulous memories and the tropical houses, all spruced up, displayed in Paris, just like in my dream. (Touchaleaume 2006, 115)

He claims to have paid several (self-)proclaimed proprietors of the houses, bribed government officials and leveraged what he calls ‘patrimonial claims’ (Gentleman 2004), which, according to Rubin, were obviously also being paid to extract bribes.

Rubin estimates the total expedition costs to have been $1 million. In light of the successful commoditisation and display after to the translocation of the MT, however, Rubin and Touchaleaume’s expenses proved to be a good investment. When Touchaleaume reports that ‘people [in Niamey and Brazzaville] were incredibly suspicious; no one could believe we had only come for “old scrap iron”’ (Hewitt 2008), this suspicion turned out to be very much justified, as old scrap iron this was not.

Rubin kept one of the houses in return for his expenses, though Forbes.com claims ‘he could have sold the house for its parts, which might have fetched $10 million [on the art market]’ (Armstrong 2006). Instead, Rubin had his house restored in Paris and soon thereafter launched a campaign of publications and exhibitions about the MT, besides permanently lending his house to the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005 (Rubin 2005, 2008, 2009). Touchaleaume equally had one of his MT restored in Paris. On completion, he first exhibited it on the banks of the Seine, ‘just like in [his] dream’ (Touchaleaume 2006, 115). In 2007, then, Touchaleaume sold one of his two MT through Christie’s in New York for the spectacular sum – widely publicised – of $4.97 million (e.g. Huppatz 2010).

Contesting technologies of authenticity and value

Rubin and Touchaleaume characterise their translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT as a rescue operation, a storyline prominently reiterated in the media (Hamilton 2007; Alexander 2008), for instance in a Guardian piece headed ‘Bullet Holes Extra: A Classic of Modern Design Has Been Saved From Squatters, Snipers and the Congolese Jungle’ (Gentleman 2004). Officials at governmental and intergovernmental cultural heritage organisations, however, protested the welcoming reactions from the field of modern and contemporary art. In fact, Rubin and Touchaleaume removed the MT from urban Brazzaville and Niamey in defiance of official complaints from French authorities and the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which pleaded for their protection on site.

Among Rubin and Touchaleaume’s fiercest critics was Bernard Toulier, the initiator of the heritage inventories which inspired the translocation of the MT in the first place. Toulier told me during an interview in Paris in August 2009 that he now believes that it was a mistake to provide ‘the information, which benefited the Parisian speculators’ and he has come to regret his initial ‘naiveté’. He says that when Seguin and Jousee were removing furniture from Brazzaville,

I attempted to convince through idealism. […] I went to their exhibitions and all, but I couldn’t talk to them, I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t put down this commercial system. And then I saw coming, coming, coming, coming wagons full of objects from over there and I felt sad in my heart.

But when Toulier was first informed of Rubin and Touchaleaume’s plans to remove the MT to France, he tried ways to counter them.

Toulier knew of the imminent translocation of the Brazzaville MT to France early on and immediately intervened. He informed Lazare Eloundo Assomo, chief of the Africa section at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, who in turn alerted national authorities in Brazzaville. When I interviewed him in Paris in August 2009, Assomo told me that he warned about the ‘risk to lose the MT because of collectors in the process of removing the houses from the Congo, and that they should remain there’. To his disappointment, nothing was done at the ministerial level because no heritage regulations applicable to ‘modern heritage’ were in place – the ironic result of the actual regulations having essentially been carried over from the colonial heritage legislation, which naturally did not conceive of the modern built environment as an eventual ‘tradition’ in need of future preservation. And although Assomo tried to get involved again – at the ‘last minute’ as he puts it – other people at another Congolese government institution, who apparently didn’t know or did not want to know the value of the houses ‘but merely saw pieces of metal’ eventually authorised the translocation.

Effectively then, Assomo’s and Toulier’s positions as heritage officials stood opposed to those of Rubin and Touchaleaume as private art collector and gallerist, highlighting global connections and disconnections between actors in the fields of art and cultural heritage. During my 2009 interview, Toulier was still puzzled that during the translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT he was approached with requests for assistance from Touchaleaume. Apparently, the art market actors did not realise how Toulier objected to their practices:

In the beginning, they went a first time to take the loose elements that were left, so they took the furniture, and a second time they went to take the house. The first time they made an exhibition and they wanted me to collaborate but I said: No, no, no! And later Eric Touchaleaume asked me to write the book, with photographs, I was proud, but no, no, no! So, it’s really – they all think that I’m crazy!

Toulier never had any doubt about the fact that the MT should remain in Brazzaville and Niamey. He contended to me that the houses ‘were prototypes in a series, but they were made for a specific environment. […] [It’s] the place as much as the object which is important to make it heritage. This object cannot be put anywhere, not by the Seine, it will never breathe’.

Ultimately, this lack of understanding illustrates the competing and conflicting technologies of authenticity and value regarding the MT. Toulier’s evaluation echoes Assomo’s, who considers exhibitions of the MT in Paris scandalous and refuses invitations to visit them. Assomo explained to me that the removal of the MT had ‘very negative consequences for our business of promoting awareness of modern heritage values in the Republic of the Congo and the preservation of colonial architectural heritage across Africa’. Thus, for Toulier and Assomo, the authenticity and value of the MT is inextricably entwined with the specific situation of the houses in the local urban fabric. Both argue for the preservation of significant buildings such as the MT in their original location, as well as listing much of the twentieth century architectural heritage in Africa as ‘shared colonial heritage’.

Contrary to the heritage officials who believe in the fundamental site-specificity of the MT, however, the private collector Robert Rubin emphasises what he calls the houses’ nomadic or itinerant character. He considers them works of art and regards their authenticity and value as essentially non-site-specific. Rubin claims that the MT have recovered their ‘original identity’ in the context of their restoration as masterpieces of modern art and industrial design (Rubin 2005, 31). He counters criticism of the MT’s removal from Africa in the academic journal Future Anterior, writing:

In the spirit of ‘presentation’ rather than any orthodox notion of ‘preservation’, the exhibition of the Tropical House seeks to capture its dynamic qualities. Preserving these prototypes where they happen to have landed hardly does justice to Prouvé’s vision of an industrialized architecture. Each new venue for the Tropical House is intended to advance the historical resituation of Prouvé. (Rubin 2005, 38)

For Rubin and his collaborators from the field of modern and contemporary art it thus was neither strictly necessary nor a viable option to preserve the houses in situ. Instead, Rubin contended to me:

The tropical house is a unique case because it is a prototype of a building system. But it has a very famous and charged specific iteration. You know, […] I can take pieces of the tropical house and put them together any way I like. […] So it has a lot of flexibility and then of course you’re taking it out of a spot, which is a freighted spot also. I mean, there is this whole postcolonial dialogue and discourse going on, and so on. […] I just thought to restore it at the moment before it came to Africa, which is one possible choice among many but probably the most logical choice for an architectural historian or another kind of art historian.

Art institutions like the Centre Pompidou and the Tate Modern in London – in front of which Touchaleaume’s house was exhibited immediately following its auction to the American hotelier André Balasz in 2008 – share Rubin’s account of the MT’s uniqueness as works of art (Centre Pompidou; Rose 2008b). After all, a show of Rubin’s house on the Pompidou’s fifth-floor balcony celebrated its ‘frank modernity’ (Centre Pompidou), without references to the structure’s problematic colonial and post-colonial histories and conspicuously conforming to Rubin’s talk of the ‘coolest Prouvé piece’.

Arguably then, there are competing and conflicting technologies of authenticity and value at stake in the approaches to the MT. On the one hand, Rubin and Touchaleaume’s practice of collecting the MT as non-site specific modern art through translocation, commoditisation and display. On the other hand, Toulier and Assomo’s practice of ‘collecting’ the houses as modern architectural heritage through appeals to their inventory, listing, and preservation in situ. Invariably however, these technologies of authenticity and value feature institutionalised areas of blindness and controversy. The best example is the fact that some of the actors involved seem to be unaware or even ignorant of each other’s positions. For instance, the French ministry of culture unwittingly financed both sides, funding the heritage inventory in Brazzaville just as well as the exhibition of the MT at the Centre Pompidou.

Furthermore, relevant areas of blindness and controversy appear predicated by specific expectations of temporality, wholeness, continuity and essence, which according to James Clifford have long been built into Western ideas of art and culture (Clifford 1988). Clifford maintains that in the wake of colonialism, objects collected from non-Western sources have pre-dominantly been classified in two major categories: as (scientific) cultural artefacts or as (aesthetic) works of art (1988). This basic distinction – fundamentally based on the opposition between tradition and modernity as tied with notions of the primitive – informs the contestations of the significance of the MT as either modern architectural heritage or modern art in ways reminiscent of colonial exchanges of culture.

First, the official re-discovery and scientific inventory of the MT as modern architectural heritage during a French research mission to Brazzaville is reminiscent of colonial approaches to the traditional built environment. In fact, the emergence of the discipline and profession of historic preservation in Europe was formatively influenced by colonial encounters with ‘other’ forms of architecture (Rabinow 1989; Jokiletho 1999; Choay 2001). When the colonisers introduced their modern regimes of building construction, this went hand in hand with the expropriation of property and the destruction of natives’ living quarters (AlSayyad 1992; Fuller 2007). Colonial architects and urban planners, however, frequently took to conserving isolated monuments. While the large-scale application of ideologies and techniques of modern architecture was to do away with the ‘backward’ ways of native dwelling once and for all, the incidental preservation of monuments underlined civilised modernity through opposition.³ As the historian Benedict Anderson puts it, for the colonial powers the monumentalisation of traditional buildings constituted an effective means to govern an indigenous population. It suggested to the natives: ‘our very presence shows you that you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either greatness or self-rule’ (Anderson 2006, 181).

Against this backdrop then, the notion of a re-discovery of the MT as modern architectural heritage is problematic. The unilateral French research into Brazzaville’s colonial architecture suggests that the Congolese have not ‘learned to appreciate modernity’ as it was introduced by their former colonisers. The description of the MT as a distinctly ‘French’ inheritance that was ‘long lost’ or ‘forgotten’ implies that the ‘culture of modernity’ is also lost in Africa, apparently providing reason enough for a French re-appropriation of Brazzaville’s colonial built fabric. Along those lines, even the disputed removal of the MT as such may serve as proof of the necessity of intervention.

Second, the removal of the houses from Africa as modern art is another reminder of colonial exchanges of culture. While the French ministry of culture commends the re-discovery of the MT and urges the Congolese government to protect the (remaining) modern architectural heritage of Brazzaville, Rubin and Touchaleaume herald the translocation of the MT as the buildings’ ‘resurrection’ (Rubin 2009, 118) from decay and misuse such discourse. But this is analogous to justifications of colonial appropriations of so-called primitive art, where the natives were also not thought to appreciate the objects quite as much – or as well – as the Westerners.

Rubin and Touchaleaume fashion themselves as saviours of the MT, which they claim faced imminent destruction in the Congo and in Niger. Touchaleaume told the Guardian that his ‘main passion is to be a kind of private curator, to make my contribution to save the heritage of the twentieth century’:

in a perfect world, we would keep the MT in situ. But in [Africa], they can’t afford to maintain or restore them and they would be lost. The important thing is to protect the artwork. (Rose 2008a)

Rubin too stated to me that ‘perhaps it would have been as valid to restore the house in situ’, but claims that his repatriation of the MT came just in time since ‘public money for French modernism is becoming scarce’. In effect, Rubin and Touchaleaume present their removal of the MT from Brazzaville and Niamey as a generous rescue operation – just like artefacts from primitive cultures, they consider the MT legitimate collector’s items.

Yet, theirs is a problematic attitude treating the MT like trophies, not only in the light of current debates about the restitution of objects of art and culture removed from Africa during colonial times. Like displays of primitive art, Rubin and Touchaleaume’s displays of the MT as icons of modern art present the houses as aesthetic objects, out of time and out of context. Besides raising questions about ethics of material integrity and integrity of place, they do not reflect on the relationships of domination, expropriation and exploitation that the MT represent as prototypes of a colonial building project. Rather, when Rubin and Touchaleaume speak of the removal of the structures from Brazzaville and Niamey in terms of their rescue and salvation, they uncritically acknowledge the colonial utopias of civilisation, progress and development for which Jean Prouvé’s designs once stood: they consider the MT noble gifts of modernity spurned by the Africans. Consequently, when Rubin and Touchaleaume consider the Maisons as works of art, they treat them as what I would like to call modern trophy. As such, their appropriation of the MT constitutes a somewhat paradoxical attempt to collect a tradition of modernity (Paz 1991): whereas colonial collections salvaged objects from of a backward, non-repeatable time, the translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT is an attempt to collect the future of a modern past (Terdimann 1993).

Though Rubin and Touchaleaume appropriate the MT as modern things, instances of a certain modern tradition, they choose to ignore the complex intertwinement of these modern things with problematic colonial histories. For example, neither Rubin’s and Touchaleaume’s exhibitions of, nor their publications about the MT critically mention Prouvé’s alternative designations, such as Maisons Coloniales. In the end, the aestheticising approach to the MT as modern trophy sanitises the houses’ colonial legacies. Moreover, any treatment of the MT as modern trophy denies the legitimacy of the houses’ post-colonial local contexts. Whereas Rubin and Touchaleaume make frequent references to Jean Prouvé as the Western master architect/designer responsible for the MT’s original design, their restorations reject historical changes made later by local inhabitants.

In this respect, an apparent parallel to what Sally Price has called the ‘anonymization’ of primitive art is relevant. According to Price,

after a Primitive artefact has been removed from the field (whether by sale, theft, or some other variant of the transfer to Western ownership) it is customarily issued a new passport. The pedigree of such an object does not normally provide detailed information on its maker or its original (native) owners; rather it counts only the Western hands through which the object has passed. (Price 1989, 102)

Similarly, Rubin’s and Touchaleaume’s restoration of the MT to their so-called ‘original condition’ bluntly avoids the mentioning of local proprietors and rejects their meaningful alterations. All emphasis is on the collector’s and dealer’s accounts of their adventurous rescue of the MT. Rubin even claims that the only traces preserved of the structures’ African habitat are the ‘bullet holes made by Kalashnikovs’ (Gordon 2004).

But, the MT did not wait for their ‘rescue’ as works of modern art. Neither did they wait for their ‘re-discovery’ and preservation as modern architectural heritage. Instead, in post-colonial Brazzaville and Niamey they served practical functions for their inhabitants, who changed them to suit their everyday needs. Although it is safe to say that the MT were not locally appreciated as valuable in terms of cultural heritage or art – certainly not before the French heritage inventory, and probably not even after their removal from the African continent – and although my analysis has shown how the dominant technologies of authenticity and value are contested, there has been no reflection on matters such as local opposition, adequate compensation, or other issues that touch upon the ethics of the relevant collecting practices.

What is remarkable about the ‘re-discovery’, translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT is not only that there are competing and conflicting technologies of authenticity and value involved. What is striking is that these technologies appear to originate solely ‘inside the West’, excluding and marginalising various residual and emergent contexts. In fact, the case of the MT seems to confirm James Clifford’s insight that ‘one cannot avoid the global reach of Western institutions allied with capitalist markets and the projects of national elites’ (Clifford 1997, 8–9).

Recontextualisation/reassemblage

Having considered the institutional practices of appropriating the MT as either modern architectural heritage or modern art, I analyse these practices as different first-order ‘observations on modernity’. Competing and conflicting as they are, as powerful technologies of authenticity and value they always grasp their referent by establishing a limited context and assuming a specific perspective on it – implying specific temporal positions and forms of historical narration that essentially depend on the opposition between tradition and modernity. However, in Luhmann’s terms the relevant technologies of authenticity and value relate to this opposition arbitrarily as first-order observations: they do not critically reflect on complex and problematic colonial and post-colonial iterations of the opposition between ‘the traditional’ and ‘the modern’. As a result, I contend that the case of the MT signals a need for second-order observations on modernity.

The Portugese artist Ângela Ferreira’s and Malinese and New York based ethnographic-filmmaker Manthia Diawara’s enable such second order observations through their respective engagements with the MT. Ângela Ferreira presented her critical installation-artwork Maisons Tropicales at the Portuguese Pavilion during the 2007 Venice Biennale (Bock 2007). Her work’s main concept is a wooden structure modelling Jean Prouvé’s pre-fab prototype in transit by configuring the MT’s dismantled parts for transportation in a container, which mirrors the way the houses where shipped to and out of Africa (Illustration 6). To experience the MT’s transitory existence, Ferreira’s Venice audience was invited to walk through this life-size container – it constituted the entry to the pavilion. Inside of the gallery, Ferreira displayed images of the Maisons’ original sites left vacant after the houses’ removal (Illustration 7).

Illustration 6. Ângela Ferreira’s installation artwork ‘Maison Tropicale’ at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Copyright: Ângela Ferreira/Bruno Ramos.

Illustration 7. The foundations of the Niamey Maison Tropicale. Copyright: Ângela Ferreira/Bruno Ramos.

In preparation for her work Ferreira travelled to Brazzaville and Niamey together with Diawara. His record of the trip is part of a documentary – simply titled Maison Tropicale, like Ferreira’s artwork – about the process leading up to the Venice exhibition (Diawara 2008). Diawara’s ethnographic film records Ferreira’s interviews with the former inhabitants of the MT in Brazzaville and Niamey, which provide counterpoints to the dominant technologies of authenticity and value at stake in the houses’ re-discovery, translocation, commoditisation and display. Jointly, Ferreira and Diawara allow a recontextualisation of the MT in their colonial and post-colonial legacies (Ribeiro Sanches 2010).

Speaking to me in Lisbon in August 2009, Ferreira adamantly disagrees with Robert Rubin and Eric Touchaleaume on the alleged non-site specificity of the MT. Like Bernard Toulier and Lazare Assomo, she considers the translocation of the houses ‘kind of an amputation’:

That’s what makes this particular object an interesting object, because its fabrication permitted that kind of mutilation and eventually revealed the kind of appropriation scam we are witnessing. […] The houses were built for a place. They weren’t built to be moved anywhere. […] I mean, houses have roots, they have foundations, even prefab houses.

For Rubin and Touchaleaume, however, the MT’s foundations, their roots, were uninteresting because they were unmovable. Left behind in Brazzaville and Niamey, they remained for Ferreira to portray in her captivating photographs of the empty lots.

Despite Ferreira’s criticism of the MT’s removal from Africa, she is cautious in her judgment. Although some cultural heritage experts would consider the Maisons as stolen in bright daylight, like primitive works of art which are now sometimes restituted to their previous, formerly colonised owners (van Beurden 2015), Ferreira explains that with her work she intends ‘to reveal a return to a kind of colonial practice’, but also ‘to highlight the idiosyncrasies of these processes and to say we need to read this in a different way’. Ferreira thinks that ‘the issue of guilt, of right and wrong, is very murky here’ and that ‘there is a lot of expediency’. With her work, she reflects on what she calls a ‘complex melting pot that is really about the relationships between Europe and Africa’.

Diawara’s visual ethnography shows Ferreira talking about the MT with interlocutors in Brazzaville and Niamey. These conversations reveal an interesting plurality of perspectives that have no role in the dominant narratives of the re-discovery, translocation, commoditisation and display of the houses (Diawara 2008). On the one hand, Artonnor Ibriahine, who used the Niamey house for shelter, expresses feelings of powerlessness and resignation in the face of the structure’s removal. On the other hand, Mireille Ngatsé, the legitimate owner of the Brazzaville houses, fought European claimants in court for her right to sell the MT. Ngatsé even used the revenue from her successful sale to redevelop the land left vacant and start a successful business, a remarkable achievement for a single Congolese woman who describes herself as ‘without contacts in the government’.

Diawara’s documentary movie also illustrates how Ferreira’s local interviewees show little awareness of the MT’s valorisation as modern architectural heritage or modern art abroad; they are genuinely surprised when presented with information of the current fate of the houses. There is one exception: When Ferreira asks Amadou Ousmane, one of her interlocutors in Niamey, whether he thinks it is a shame ‘they’ bought and took the houses, Ousmane denies this, reminding the artist that the only reason she interviews him is the MT’s prominent display outside of Africa. Either confirming or perhaps questioning ideals of a shared colonial heritage ‘at risk’ (ICOMOS 2001), Ousmane claims that the Niamey house was not previously regarded as of heritage value, let alone of much value otherwise; ‘people wanted to get rid of it’.

Concerning the Brazzaville MT, Ngatsé affirms Ousmane’s estimation, believing that even if there had been local awareness of the houses as cultural heritage or art, no government resources would have been made available to issue priority care. In any case, Ngatsé herself was unable to execute the necessary repairs and she doubts the willingness and ability of the Congolese state to engage in any such work. When confronted with images of Eric Touchaleaume’s MT on display in Paris, Ngatsé contends that ‘Africa isn’t Europe. […] We couldn’t have kept it. It would never have become what it is now’.

Of Ferreira’s interviewees, only the Brazzaville based artist Besongo angrily demands the return of the Brazzaville MT to the African continent and their valorisation as Congolese national heritage. Yet Besongo’s opinion remains an exception. In fact, when Diawara says that as an African he would like to see the MT back in Africa, Ngatsé responds echoing tenets of current restitution debates (Cuno 2010; van Beurden 2015): ‘Yes, it would be nice if they came back to Africa. But, who would look after them, that is the problem. […] I prefer that the house stays where it is now. It’s better off there’. Thus, Ngatsé relativises Besongo’s anger as well as Ferreira and Diawara’s criticism, questioning ideals of an in situ preservation of Brazzaville’s modern architecture as cultural heritage.

In the end, Ngatsé’s opinion indicates that there are alternative narratives of post-colonial appropriations and re-appropriations to be told about the MT. Ferreira and Diawara acknowledge this when they juxtapose Ngatsé’s story of assuming agency to sell off the Brazzaville houses with the presentation of one of the MT on the art market. For example, Diawara’s film projects Ngatsé’s reaction to the information that her house, which she sold for ca. $135,000, is on sale for close to $5 million in New York. Left speechless only for a short moment, she quickly goes on to say:

This value of the house, it pleases me. I wish I could have sold it for its current price, but since it didn’t work out, I am happy because at least it proves I wasn’t sleeping in a shanty.

Providing a forum for Ngatsé’s perspective – among others – Ferreira’s and Diawara’s artistic and ethnographic remediations enable the projection of a certain balance between local appropriations and re-appropriations of the MT and the dominant Western collecting practices. Ferreira’s artwork and Diawara’s film break up a particular us/them opposition usually taken for granted in the case of the MT and thus amount to relevant second-order observations on modernity.

In fact, Luhmann notes that much art – and ethnography one might add – provokes its audience by insisting on being observed as observant; it procures second-order observations. According to Luhmann, art is thus a particularly effective means of distinction between contexts and their observations. He claims that when one observes artists resorting to their means, one observes the marking of difference on an initially empty time, as well as on an empty space. According to him, artists use second-order observations to develop self-reflexive forms; they introduce new descriptions of objects as observations, for instance based on the opposition between tradition and modernity (Luhmann 1998, 2000).

As I have shown, the dominant practices of collecting the MT as modern architectural heritage and modern art depend on technologies of authenticity and value, which in turn rely on the opposition between tradition and modernity and therefore mark time on difference. Ferreira’s and Diawara’s work criticises these practices as first-order observations on a limited context, while at the same time indicating how ‘creative recontextualisation and indeed re-authorship may […] follow from taking, from purchase or from theft’ (Thomas 1991, 5). For example, Ngatsé testifies to such a re-authorship when she reflects on the post-colonial legacies of her own Brazzaville MT. Consequently, by providing a forum for Ngatsé through their art and ethnography, Ferreira and Diawara enable second-order observations on the authentications and valorisations of the MT as modern architectural heritage and modern art, pointing out potential to reassemble the dominant technologies of authenticity and value. Because Ferreira and Diawara portray the re-discovery, translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT as historically and politically contingent operations, they problematise the self-description of contemporary norms and forms of art and culture collecting as modern.

Of course, in the face the power and authority of the relevant institutional practices of art and cultural heritage preservation, the question arises whether Ferreira’s and Diawara’s work can have a lasting impact in terms of a recontextualisation and potential reassemblage of technologies of authenticity and value. Although Diawara’s movie is screened frequently and Ferreira’s artwork has been received positively in the field of modern and contemporary art, Ferreira expressed her doubts. In Lisbon, she cautions me that her exhibition received considerably less public attention than the auction and points out that the major problem with the sale was that it ‘depoliticised the whole thing’.

While Ferreira’s ambition is to ‘re-politicise’ the MT, in the end she is hesitant to attribute a big impact to her work. In our interview, she asks me: ‘How much visibility does an art object have? You know, it was a good project for me, but I don’t think art is that powerful. I don’t think it’s going to change Robert Rubin’. In the aftermath of the Venice Biennale Rubin repeatedly tried to get in contact with Ferreira – he wanted to buy her Maison Tropicale too. Ferreira politely declined. But, because of his confrontation with her work Rubin has started to show a certain degree of self-reflexivity about his position as a collector. In an article, he mentions Ferreira’s ‘keen sense of modernism’s colonial failures and their dystopian wakes’, if only in passing (Rubin 2009).⁴

Conclusion

With this article, I analyse the powerful institutional practices at stake in the ‘re-discovery’, translocation, commoditisation and display of the MT. Describing the global connections and disconnections between the various actors involved, I re-contextualise in their colonial and post-colonial legacies the dominant technologies of authenticity and value that render the MT either modern architectural heritage or modern art. Themselves inheritances of modernity, these technologies reveal contemporary norms and forms of collecting objects of art and cultural heritage, which are reminiscent of colonial exchanges of culture and invariably reduce the MT’s historical and political meanings.

But, whereas contemporary collecting practices engaging with the MT thus rely on a problematic opposition between tradition and modernity, even if the resultant authentications and valorisations are powerfully competing and conflicting – as limited Luhmannian first-order observations they are not totally immutable. In fact, I show how through their art and ethnography Ângela Ferreira and Manthia Diawara enable relevant second-order observations on modernity. Proving the necessity of recontextualisation and pointing to the critical potential of reassemblage, they critically capture what James Clifford means when he speaks of the transience of the current art-culture-authenticity system: ‘the stuff of contemporary cultural politics, creative and virulent, enacted in the overlapping historical contexts of colonisation/decolonisation, nation formation/minority assertions, capitalist market expansion/consumer strategies’ (Clifford 1997, 218).

Ultimately, I demonstrate that technologies of authenticity and value are inevitably contingent. I show – again – that cultural or artistic authentications have as much to do with an inventive present, as with the past and its objectification, preservation or future revival (Clifford 1988; Lowenthal 1997). Therefore, if Nicholas Thomas once wrote that objects of art and culture ‘are not what they were made to be, but what they have become’ (1991, 4), with the transitoriness of the MT in mind it is perhaps appropriate for me to reformulate this claim: cultural objects are not what they were made to be, but – under contested technologies of authenticity and value – they will always remain what they are becoming.

Notes on contributor

Christoph Rausch is an assistant professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at University College Maastricht. In this capacity, he is a co-founding steering committee member of the Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH), which also constitutes the interdisciplinary institutional context for his research. He was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and a guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Notes

1. Ilana Gershon has discussed how – perhaps counterintuitively – Luhmann’s systems theory is useful for anthropologists like Clifford. According to her, Luhmann offers ‘an approach that enables scholars to conceptualise anew radical difference, agency, resistance, global/local dichotomies, and reflexivity’ (2005, 105).

2. Another example of the tensions between heritage preservation efforts and the market in modern industrial design on the art market is the Indian City of Chandigarh where, before its official designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, furniture integral to the city’s design by Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier was removed for sale.

3. Also the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, begun in the 1950s, was an archetypical modern development project seemingly at odds with the preservation of cultural heritage. When the waters of Lake Nasser threatened ancient monuments, it was ‘now or never’, as the UNESCO courier headlined in 1961: social and economic progress was to be paired with ‘cultural and spiritual progress’ through cultural heritage preservation (UNESCO 1961, 6). The challenge taken on by an international team of engineers to raise the whole temple of Abu Simbel by 200 feet to save it from the raised water level particularly fascinated a global popular audience. In fact, this prominent re-interpretation of in situ preservation –notably pairing tradition and modernity – prefigured the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. I reflect on these matters at length in my book ‘Global Heritage Assemblages: Development and Modern Architecture in Africa’ (Rausch 2017).

4. Another example of a critical artistic remediation of the tension between the preservation of a ‘modern heritage’ and the art market is Amy Siegel’s video artwork Provenance, which traces in reverse the global trade in furniture from the Indian city of Chandigarh.