Open Your Eyes

Abstract

Human culture needs to reinvent itself in order to evolve, to adapt and survive in new environments. From an ethical point of view, there is reappropriation because there has been dispossession. African objects that have been repaired using Western leftovers, or overexpressive repairs are kept aside in the collections of Western museums as inadequate.Since the Age of Reason, the Occident has always categorised and ordered the world, following its own cultural criteria and beliefs, which led to a misunderstanding. Western human sciences, like ethnology, were developed to analyse the non-Occidental world, in order to control it. The unexpected aesthetic of ‘antemodern’ repaired objects from non-Western cultures, which have been colonised, embodies a sign of resistance. It happens from an act of a cultural otherness, which reappropriates the cultural space that it was taken from (and taken over by a foreigner occupant and ideology), to create a new state that could be understood as resurrection. Because Reappropriation is above everything a Repair. This political and poetical gesture reveals the existence of another ethics and aesthetics of a satisfaction of the approximation, opposite to the Western search for and myth of perfection.