14 DAY TRIAL // Artists Lars Cuzner and Mohamed Ali Fadlabi decided to challenge Norwegians to face a racial blemish on their country’s history by opening an unusual display in Oslo.
They are re-creating the “Congo Village,” an exhibit that 100 years ago, at the 1914 Jubilee Exhibition, displayed African tribes for public entertainment and attracted a lot of attention, with 1.4 million visitors over the course of its four-month stay at Frogner Park in Oslo.
The notorious “human zoo” involved 80 Senegalese men, women and children who lived in a simulated African village and went about their daily activities of cooking, eating and making handicrafts as usual, according to International Business Times. The African people were displayed in cages and depicted as uncivilized and primitive animals, a move that sparked a lot of controversy at the time.
Now, a hundred years later, Fadlabi and Cuzner have recreated the controversial exhibition and dedicated it to the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution. Their project, called “European Attraction Limited,” exhibits 80 volunteers taking turns living on show in primitive huts similar to those seen in Sub-Saharan villages.
The two artists encouraged people from all around the world to participate in the project and live in the fake villages, and hope their “Congo Village” will help erase what they say is Norwegians' collective amnesia about racism. The bizarre art installation is meant to provoke a discussion on colonialism and racism in a post-modern world.
“We are rebuilding the village in order to address issues around historical amnesia, misrepresentations, the evolution of racism and the architecture behind the nation-building process,” Fadlabi and Cuzner said at the opening.
While most Norwegians would rather forget the mistakes of the past, and specifically the original “human zoo,” the two curators of European Attraction Limited reproduced the exhibit in an attempt to highlight questions concerning racism and cultural dominance.
“Norwegians have been propagating this self-image of a post-racial society and it's been internalized that it's a good, tolerant society. It's great branding and it’s self-perpetuating but it's a false image,” Cuzner said.
As you would have expected, the new Congo Village has met a lot of disapproval, with many anti-racism organizations labeling the project offensive and racist.
The exhibit cost around 1.4 million crowns ($240,000/€175,220) and was partly founded by a government agency called Public Art Norway. It was opened to the public on May 15.
The human zoos were popular exhibits in the 19th and 20th centuries, and often emphasized the cultural differences between Europeans of Western civilization and non-European people.