Xanana Gusmao's 'Tunnel of Time'

Xanana Gusmao is famous for his inspirational role in the struggle for independence, and founding of Timor-Leste.  As an accomplished artist he is less well known.  I've been lucky enough to meet him and discuss this part of his life, as a result of which ICS has been conserving a number of his paintings.

The amazing aspect to this is that Gusmao is self taught. As he explained to me, he was at the time imprisoned by the Indonesian government in Cipinang prison in Jakarta for his role in leading Fretilin, the Timor independence militia.  Fellow prisoners were encouraged to yell abuse at him in his cell, and one day his food delivery flap opened but instead of the usual tirade, it turned out to be a friendly warder asking what he was spending his time doing in the cell. Suggesting he might like to try painting, the warder gave him a blank canvas, a brush and some paint tubes. When Gusmao protested that he had not a clue as to how to start, the warder told him to just try it out and if he didn't like the result, he could just paint over the top again.

Thus began an artistic journey that was quickly encouraged by his Australian wife, Kirsty Sword Gusmao, who sent Gusmao  various 'how to' books.  Given the time he had on his hands, and progressively relaxed conditions allowing access to materials he became increasingly skilful.

He decided to draw images of his early life growing up in Timor, but also to illustrate the pain of being separated from his wife. He did this by painting Kirsty from behind looking into a mirror, creating a new image with a further mirror  as each year of separation passed (see image below). In all he painted six of these highly evocative images, a series of paintings now known as Gusmao's 'Tunnel of Time'.

 

Last December the restored paintings were placed in their permanent position in the new Gusmao Reading Room in the cultural centre in Dili, unveiled by his sons (see image below) , where they rightly have now become part of the artistic patrimony of this young nation.

For the full story visit http://delindili.wordpress.com/

 

Telling stories by conservation

I have long been an advocate of the power of story telling in both justifying the process of conservation and also in achieving engagement with wider audiences. Conservation per se just to extend an artwork or object’s life in perpetuity may be ethically the right thing to do, but it is rarely going to grab the attention of funding bodies or the public.

Driven by the very real concerns of reducing support for conservation training (both the Textile Conservation Centre and the V&A/Royal College of Arts in the UK closed last year), the International Institute for Conservation ran another in its’ successful series of dialogues in January 2010 entitled ‘Conservation in Crisis – communicating the value of what we do’. This has just been posted on the IIC website. I must admit to some bias on the value of these dialogues as I am Vice President of IIC, and am strongly supportive of the Institute taking a more active advocacy role.

And what comes out clearly from the dialogue is that storytelling is a significant key to engaging a wider audience, and one that conservators continue to be poor at exploiting. Whilst a range of programs providing public access to conservation, including opening up labs to guided tours and having conservation treatments carried out in public galleries, have had some success, as soon as conservators commit themselves to paper, they become dead boring to anyone but other conservators (and let it be honestly said, often to them as well). And this is generally because they focus on the treatment rather than the story behind the object that is revealed.

There is a great example of this given by one of the dialogue participants about a cross that was conserved in Venice. The conservators involved when explaining their work talked at length about the details of the treatment undertaken, yet failed to mention that what was really interesting about the cross is that for two hundred years it was carried before condemned prisoners on their procession to the scaffold, i.e. it was one of the last things such people saw on earth.

I have just attended a meeting of the International Polar Heritage Committee in Punta Arenas, Chile, and one of the speakers was bewailing the focus on the Heroic era and the explorers of the early Twentieth Century, at the expense of the conservation of the heritage of the early nineteenth century whalers and sealers in Antarctica. The simple explanation is that the story telling around the explorers has been much more successfully told than that of the whalers and sealers, and as a result the funds have flowed for conservation work for the former. Admittedly it helps having some substantial huts and their 15,000 artifacts as compared to a few difficult to discern archaeological remains on which to hang them