Koyo Kouoh

Marta Gnyp: Let’s start with the unavoidable subject, how are you coping with the Covid-19 pandemic?

Koyo Kouoh: Well, as part of the effort toward curbing the spread of the virus we had to close the museum around March16th. This was about a week before South Africa officially announced a national state of disaster and lockdown. We were still busy trying to gauge how it would affect us. It came unexpectedly; many institutions, arts institutions particularly, were taken by surprise. We had to follow the government stipulations and at that time we were already anticipating that the lockdown would be extended.

MG: The whole world has been taken by surprise and nobody has expected that the impact will be so huge.

KK: It has been very difficult for museums across the globe, especially those who substantially rely on admissions, events, gastronomy and retail as an income stream like we do. This is a concerning issue at Zeitz MOCAA, particularly because we are still a very young museum. We are not financially solid yet. We are still establishing ourselves as an institution, and we were barely coming out of the crisis of the museum’s initial ill inception. Having to close is therefore quite a hard hit.

MG: How are you going to finance the gap? As far as I know you are a partly private partly public museum?

KK: The lingering narrative from previous times regarding the inception of Zeitz MOCAA is still wrong and demands continuous correction. Considering the way the museum was initiated, Zeitz MOCAA is to a large extent – from my perspective – a public museum that is privately operated. This is evidenced in how the V&A Waterfront invested US$35 million towards the renovation of the former grain silo. The V&A Waterfront is a real estate company in charge of regenerating Cape Town’s harbor area where the museum is located. In turn, it is a company established by Growth Point Properties which is funded by the Government Employees Pension Fund. Pension Fund money is put on the capital and real estate markets for the V&A Waterfront, which manages and operates with it. So, indirectly, the finances come from the contributors to the Pension Fund. Like many other pension funds across the globe, they are often used towards investments in the capital and real estate markets, this is nothing unusual. We managed to bridge the financial gap over this time by making enormous sacrifices in regards to reducing salaries but maintaining all jobs. This was very important to me. We also benefited from an increased financial contribution from our trustees. Which is the only way we could survive thus far.

MG: So, one of the initiators was the V&A Waterfront and then came the collection.

KK: The V&A Waterfront put down US$35 million to renovate the grain silo which is on their premises. Zeitz MOCAA is not a private museum built by Jochen Zeitz in Africa, as is generally stated in uninformed narratives. Rather, it’s a partnership between the V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz. The museum carries Zeitz’s name because this is the agreement both partners reached. V&A provided the building and the resources to operate it and Zeitz loaned the art collection to program it. Zeitz did not invest US$35 million to build the museum nor is he bankrolling the operational costs either. We are a hybrid form of something between public, private and corporate, and work with an economic model that reflects the hybridity of such a status.

MG: In order to avoid the confusion, are you thinking about getting rid of the name of Zeitz in the name of the museum?

KK: The general noise focuses too much on details that are most of the times inconsequential. While I fully understand and even agree with most of the criticism raised around the name, I would argue that it’s not necessarily a name that makes or breaks a worthwhile initiative such as Zeitz MOCAA. It is its governance, staff, programmatic output and collaborations that one establishes that provide meaning to the work. My energy thus far is expended in these areas. The name is a more complex matter that is in my opinion the least urgent point to address. I believe that fleshing out the program and heightening curatorial criticality and discursive gravity and programmatic acumen is more urgent. Repositioning the museum as a respectable civic institution in dialogue with its audience and at the service of art and artists is my top priority.

MG: Let us go to you. I’m very curious about how you became a preeminent art curator of contemporary African art, which immediately generates another question: can we speak about contemporary African art in general? I understand that you were born in Cameroon, I read that you speak fluently five languages, French and English is perhaps self-explanatory, but German and Italian are not.

KK: I’m always astonished that people in the West are surprised that Africans speak many different languages. Africa is a continent of thousands and thousands of languages. The very country that I hail from, Cameroon, has at least two hundred and fifty officially recorded languages alone. Naturally, we are brought up speaking at least two or three languages at an early age in the home, or through socialization in our neighborhoods. Then one goes on to school, and learns the colonial languages, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

MG: What was your first language? What did you speak at home?

KK: My first language is Douala. Douala is the language of the people I come from in Cameroon, and it’s also the name of the city I was born and raised in. Speaking multiple languages is not an achievement, it’s not extraordinary for an African to speak three, four, five languages. It’s absolutely normal.

MG: It looks like art was not your first choice as profession because you went to Switzerland to study business administration. Did you discover art for yourself in Switzerland?

KK: How does one come to art? Art is about sensitivities. Art is about spirit. It’s about how we connect to the world, how we connect to ourselves. How me make sense of the magic that is life. My interest and appreciation for art began at home in Cameroon. I came to art because I obviously had the sensitivity and interest for it. I had a calling for it, and I developed a passion for it because I happen to know artists and be totally enthralled by some of them.

MG: It was in Douala when you were a young girl?

KK: Is it important for you to locate where it happened?

MG: Yes, because I want to understand whether you come to understanding art from the African or the Western perspective.

KK: Well, I think that my perspective is definitely African. My perspective cannot be anything else because I look at everything from the perspective of my reality of an African black woman. I strongly believe that Art in Euro-America is not necessarily understood in the same way as it is in many African countries. In the West, art may be seen as a very special kind of existence parallel to society at large. However, in many African societies, particularly during the time I was growing up in the 1970s, creative practice is embedded in and is integral to daily life. This means that it may not always match the white cube field that the West established. However, if you absolutely want to trace my chronology, my first interest in creative expression was literature. I think writing is one of the most difficult yet also one of the most engaging and complex expressions of ourselves. From literature, I eventually became interested in visual arts. I was educated in a Jesuit school that really devoted a significant part of the curriculum to creative expression. This meant that students could (it was actually compulsory) select as many forms of artistic expression as one could imagine. So, my engagement with the artistic creativity began there. Additionally, my grandmother used to sew. She was not a professional seamstress, but she had an incredible sense of style. Even though I cannot say that I come from a background where art was enjoyed in the Western sense, I was always exposed to creativity, for you cannot grow up on the continent without being engaged in dance, music, the culinary and the sartorial to the least.

MG: You said something very interesting about this big difference in how we look at art in the Western tradition and the way you perceive art in Africa. Do you expect that in due course there will be also a similar art history created in Africa as we had it in the Western world? We created among others the Renaissance and Baroque and classicism, modernism, post-modernism. Do you think that this kind of art history with periodization and well-defined movements will be created in Africa?

KK: When you place the question of a comparative art history in the future, it suggests that it doesn’t exist already.

Read the full interview in the book.