William Wilson: The Black Ocean
About the project:
The Black Ocean is French artist William Wilson’s homage to his ancestors and his reflection on humanity and its capacity for both great achievement and nobility, and the basest horror and depravity.
Wilson, a painter, printmaker, sculptor, author and illustrator based in Paris, journeyed to West Africa where, over a period of nearly two years, he worked with artisans in Abomey, Benin to create a series of eighteen fabric panels interpreting the historical narratives of the peoples of West Africa and of the infamous triangle trade.
These powerful textiles bear witness to the richness of African culture and symbology and the complex histories that interweave in reconstructing the African diaspora.(text website artist)
About the book published by Gallimard, France
The Black Ocean is a series of 18 tapestries, patchwork, appliqué and embroidery, that narrates the history of the Gulf of Benin from the 15th to the 21th century. an epic and tragic saga of the bonds and struggles fuelled by slavery, spread on three continents, by an artist born from a Togolese father and a French mother.
William Wilson used for these tapestries a traditional craft developed in the royal courts of Danxomé, located in the present Benin, in Africa. Two years were required to complete this work that mixed artistic, pedagogic and historical purposes. For over 20 years William Wilson had gather informations on his own african family ; this personal quest adds originals and sensitives insights that enlights the complexity of this history.
Black men are the main subject of the project: powerful African kings, slave dealers or captives carried away to the Caribbean islands and the American continent, taking their culture and traditions along with them, maroons slaves who escaped upon arrival or later, living hidden in the forest, the educated elites of the Mina kingdom, royal hostages at the time of early colonization taken to Europe then brought back to their country in Africa, Black Americans united by Martin Luther King Jr under a peaceful banner or the most active branch of the Black Panthers, Black musicians, Black artists,Black freedom fighters, Black people. Each tapestry represents a historical time or event. From the encounter of African people with Portuguese sailors on the “Slave coast” to the triangular trade, the colonisation or to the civil rights movements in the 1960’s in the US, William Wilson aims at retracing the links between the African continent and the creation of the modern world.Fusing his artistic approach with a pedagogic one, William Wilson provides in his text the personal and historical background necessary to understand the full meaning and scope of the work. (text Gallimard)
