Blaise Mandefu Ayawo of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, a collective of plantation workers from the Democratic Republic of Congo that is representing the Netherlands at this year’s Venice Biennale, has died at 55.
The artist and eight other members of CATPC travelled to Venice to install and open their exhibition, but Mandefu Ayawo was hospitalised for two weeks before passing away at Venice’s Ospedale dell’Angelo.
Mandefu Ayawo was an elder of CATPC and was integral to the group’s efforts of recovering land in his hometown of Lusanga and reforesting it. Since 2014, CATPC has been using money from artwork sales to buy back land from Unilever and transforming them into biodiverse agroforests.
For Venice, the collective installed a series of cacao sculptures in and around the pavilion. The artist created the exhibition’s central sculpture titled Mvuyu Libérateur that depicts a bird splitting open a white cube to reclaim the energy that has financed and built European museums through forced labour.
