KOTA

Description

Kota peoples of Equatorial Africa (Gabon and Congo – Brazzaville) developed in their representations of ancestors dreamlike creativity combining a strong sense of stylization of reality tending to abstraction at an amazing sense of decor with widespread use of metal – copper, brass, iron. But what for us Westerners seems to have been a “taste” aesthetic was actually in Kota symbolic necessity. The use of copper as the scenery was a sign of wealth and social power. The figure of mbulu–ngulu reliquary was an icon, the visual cue of a spirit world where the ancestors continue to watch over their descendants. “Tool” essential for the survival of the groups, it allowed ongoing communication between the living and the dead. Memory devices and instruments for mobilizing occult Gabonese and Congolese old, reliquary figures and Kota initiation masks in their different forms, have gradually become the emblems of ancient culture and ancestral values of the great African rainforest peoples.