ARTAFRICAKaleta is performed only by young boys, who gather in temporary and spontaneous bands during
the New Year period. They go from house to house, dancing and playing makeshift instruments in
exchange for small tips. The musicians and singers never wear masks and their percussive instruments
are made out of reused material (cans, bottles, pieces of scrap metal etc). The dancers are always
masked and never talk. They communicate only through gestures and only respond individually and
collectively to the name of Kaleta.
Kaleta/Kaleta was first shown at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2014 as a performative and monumental
video installation, where the hall in which it was shown was divided into two spaces. In one of them,
the ‘Kaleta space,’ the ‘experiencers’ (or ‘spectactors’) wore masks on which I had intervened with
spray paint. The masks were free to the public and they could keep them both as a physical memory
of their experience and as an art piece. I later had the pleasure of seeing them displayed as such
in several places, including the home of a well-known collector. The second space was the ‘Persona
space,’ a reference to the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung’s concept of the ‘social mask,’ in which people
were free to either wear a mask or not. Kaleta/Kaleta incorporates hundreds of audio and video bits
that can be infinitely recombined, each time producing different pieces and performances. Its music
incorporates traditional percussions of Benin, Brazil or Cuba, Jamaican dub, Chicago house music
and Nigerian afrobeatz.
The improvisation part is that in all versions of the piece, the dimensions and the media are variable
(what I call ‘variable geometry’) so there is an element of improvisation. In the installation, the videos
THAT ART FAIR / IN CONVERSATION WITH EMO DE MEDEIROS 7/22
Emo de Medeiros, Kaleta/Kaleta (still), 2014. Courtesy of the artist. NEXT PAGE: Emo de Medeiros, Vodunaut #1 (Hyperminder),
- Helmet, cowry shells, paint, plastic tubes, smartphone. Image courtesy of the artist.