It’s been a minute since I watched videos from the Met’s The Artist Project, and this time Nayland Blake discussing a Bamana boli from Mali landed differently.
Part of that is my own deeper appreciation of Blake’s work, especially their interest in specific forms of creativity or aesthetic experience that break with the artist/audience, object/viewer paradigm: Blake’s talked about both BDSM and furry communities as sites where understanding is predicated on participation, not just observation. And that resonates with their discussion of the Met’s boli as an object created by a community, through ritual use, whose power and form are the result of accretion, not individualized making.
And part of that is also an expanded awareness of boliw themselves, specifically the recurrence of a boli in Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS. For a minute I figured it was being newly aware of boli typology that made me think the Met’s boli looked like Joseph’s boli. But it’s not just the Met’s boli on Funmilayo Akechukwu’s Stanford poster, but the Met’s photo of the Met’s boli.
I have to watch the film again to see, but before now, I’d have been surprised if the boli in several of the film’s scenes was the Met’s boli. Now I’m thinking that if Joseph wanted, his film’s community of artists and scholars could absolutely get the loan for the Trans-Atlantic Biennial.
The Artist Project, Season 1: Nayland Blake on boli [metmuseum]
Boli (power object) [metmuseum]
Previously: Spiraling on BLKNWS