The plantation system not only allowed for the accumulation of vast wealth, but also for the financing and construction of white cube museums across Europe. The white cube is indebted to the plantations. Having benefitted from the forced labor that turned many into enslaved people, it is culpable for and complicit in the cruelty of a murderous system of extraction that has exhausted and keeps on exhausting these lands.
While white cubes worldwide are now decolonizing, no white cube can claim to decolonize as long as the plantations are not; hence the need for the return of a white cube to a plantation that has financed it.
“Only if and when we get our land back can museums and audiences claim that they are decolonizing.”
- Ced’art Tamasala & Matthieu Kasiama (CATPC), Artnet, June 14, 2022
In 2017, on their reclaimed land, CATPC built a white cube: the first to be constructed on plantation soil. With the establishment of the White Cube Lusanga, the mechanisms through which plantations underwrite the art world are reversed. The white cube attracts the capital and visibility needed to invent a new ecological and economic model on site: the Post-Plantation.
The White Cube is based in Lusanga, formerly called Leverville. This village deep in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was once the capital of an immense empire of palm oil created and maintained by the Lever Brothers (now Unilever). Unilever eradicated the forests and enslaved entire communities on the plantations in Lusanga and elsewhere. When, after 100 years of extraction, the land was fully exhausted and no longer of use, Unilever sold it off to corporations that continued their practices of extractive monoculture.
With the income from their art, CATPC re-appropriates this once confiscated land and develops the Post Plantation: a community-owned, multi-species sacred forest that will nourish generations to come. Bringing back biodiversity, restoring food security and mitigating climate change through the regeneration of forests: these are all key to decolonizing plantations.
In the middle of the Post-Plantation, the White Cube Lusanga presents a program that not merely offers the public a beautiful spectacle, but also ensures that the utmost positive impact is made – both material (economic) and immaterial (cultural and historical memory) – on exhausted plantations like the one in Lusanga.
Past exhibitions have included the inaugural exhibition The Repatriation of the White Cube (2017) and the solo exhibition of Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, The Judgement of the White Cube (2022).
At the White Cube Lusanga, art will slowly become sacred again through its connection with the sacredness of the Post-Plantation.
