The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Va-Bene Fiatsi, known as ‘crazinisT artisT,’ is a performance artist and activist from Ghana, West Africa, whose practice is complex, nuanced, and not easily reducible to a simple description. Fiatsi has achieved great success, both in Ghana and abroad: “crazinisT has performed and exhibited across the globe, including in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany, Netherlands, Cape Verde, USA, Spain, Brazil, France, Sweden, Hungary, Belgium, Luxembourg, Japan, and the UK.
In addition to a rigorous performance art practice, Fiatsi is a prominent activist and spokeswoman for the transgender and wider queer community in Ghana and West Africa. This is of particular timely significance as the Ghanaian government is currently considering a bill that would criminalize LGBTQIA+ so-called “lifestyle,” which is already the case in other West African countries. Fiatsi descends from a royal family of the Ewe People. The Ewe are prominent from Southeastern Ghana, in what is known as the Volta Region, through coastal and central Togo, and into Benin.
Fiatsi is the founder and artistic director of crazinisT artisT studiO, Our Railway Cinema Gallery, and perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR), which “aims at radicalizing the arts and promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and critical thinkers.” pIAR, located in Kumasi, Ghana, allows artists from all over the world to live as a collective, work individually and collaboratively, and to immerse themselves in Ghanaian culture. Additionally, Fiatsi’s studio, which houses the residency program, also serves as a safe house for endangered and at-risk queer youth in Ghana.
Connection, Transformation, and Activism
While my position is in part informed by New Materialism, I prefer to rely directly on indigenous West African and particularly Ewe conceptions of the significance of clay as a lens through which to view Fiatsi’s work, epitomized by a performance given during a residency at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville in 2024. By considering an artist whose work is immanently contemporary in terms of message, theory, process, intended audience, social practice, and venue, by way of indigenous West African ontologies and epistemologies, the false binary of “traditional” versus “contemporary” art, often applied subjectively to artists from West Africa, can be challenged and dismantled.
Fiatsi describes the beginning of her relationship with clay as conceptually and spiritually imbued material, thus, “My journey with clay began around 2010/2011 during my university studies in painting and sculpture at the KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), initially as an academic requirement. However, I soon discovered a spiritual and transformative quality in its materiality, developing a deep connection that later evolved beyond its use in sculpture and performance.”
In February 2024, Va-Bene Fiatsi was a visiting artist at the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. During this residency, she delivered a lecture regarding her performance work, research, social practice, and activism; conducted studio visits and critiques with undergraduate and graduate students from various areas within the School of Art; and gave a performance titled Who Heals the Healer?. This work confronted the under-recognized trauma of those who engage in activism and advocacy, especially within the context of LGBTQIA+ concerns in Ghana, where this community is currently under attack in the public discourse and facing potential criminalization by proposed legislation. For Fiatsi, clay is intrinsically linked to the body and its transformative potential: “By 2013, as I started confronting both the university community and public spaces on queerness and the violence we face, clay returned to me as a powerful spiritual grounding, death, and life. It reshaped my understanding of the body’s fluidity and capacity for transformation and our connection to the ancestors. This resonated deeply with our burial rituals, which state, “anyie ne nye, anyi ke na ga trɔa azu” (You are clay and you will return to clay). This coincided with a period when I had metaphorically “declared myself dead” to confront the challenges of a transitional journey, and radical artivism while anticipating a future of “untold horrors” that materialised a decade later into an anti-LGBTQIA+ bill.”
Who Heals the Healer?
The one-woman, 33-minute performance, Who Heals the Healer?, took place in a small on-campus gallery. When the performance commenced, the artist emerged from a room located down the hall from the gallery, immediately breaking the fourth wall by entering the audience’s space. Fiatsi was clothed in a loincloth and entirely covered with clay slurry and bits of solid clay. As she made her way down the hallway toward the gallery, she began to sing a refrain that would continue throughout the piece, a plaintive lament in Ewe language of a child calling out to an estranged mother:
“Naye Naye Naye Mother, Mother, Mother
Naye Naye yeee repeated
Ne do Agutoa nu de if you reach the peak of Agu mountain
Ne se gbedidia de, Nanya be nye le yor wo
if you hear any voice, you should know that I am the one calling you
Ne do Agutoa nu de if you reach the peak of Agu mountain
Ne se gbedidia de, Nanya be nye le yor wo
if you hear any voice, you should know that I am the one calling you
Nornye Nornye Nornye Mother, Mother Mother (in different Ewe dialect)
Nornye Nornye Nornye repeated
Ne do Agutoa nu de if you reach the peak of Agu mountain
Ne se gbedidia de, Nanya be nye le yor wo
if you hear any voice, you should know that I am the one calling you”
Fiatsi sang in a high, lilting voice and the pain implied by the lyrics was palpable. Portions of the artist’s face and body were obscured by applied clay. The combined effect of voice and appearance was fantastical, otherworldly, and unsettling. After singing the initial refrains, Fiatsi began to pack her mouth with soft clay, and the continued singing was reduced to humming the melody as Fiatsi made her way into the gallery space, followed in procession by the audience. The gallery’s entrance wall was entirely glass, and the audience was divided between those who entered the gallery as companions and witnesses accompanying the artist, and those who remained outside and removed.
Arranged on the gallery floor was a wide circle made from shot-glass-sized cups containing a popular West African drink made from hibiscus flowers, ginger, and other herbs and spices, known as sobolo in Ghana and by other names throughout West Africa. Also piled in the middle of the floor was the residue from making the tea. Audience members were invited to drink from the small cups in a reverential, sacramental fashion. As Fiatsi continued to make a slow procession around the space, she would pause to either attempt to drink the sobolo or eat the leftover hibiscus leaves and herbs. The clay previously placed in her mouth obstructed her ingestion and singing and she was periodically overcome with fits of gagging until the clay and other substances could be slowly swallowed. Fiatsi would then put additional clay slurry into her mouth from a container in the room. During all of this, the singing never completely stopped, except in momentary fits of coughing.
For viewers, the performance was viscerally and emotionally overpowering. The effect was of viewing, and by extension being complicit in, self-destruction brought about by sheer loneliness and despair. Though the appearance of the performer was uncanny, and the physical trauma of ingesting clay and other materials was shocking, rather than repulsion, the audience was overcome by compassion. In light of the title, Who Heals the Healer?, and the plaintive call for an absent parent, and with the knowledge of Fiatsi’s activism and social practice, the existential pain of a leader at the forefront of civil rights activism was palpable.
The following night during Fiatsi’s public lecture, another layer of trauma was made evident. For Fiatsi, physical danger is not just theoretical. She has been, and continues to be, subject to the aggressions perpetrated against trans people traveling internationally, including questioning her identity, invasive searches, and detention. In the same town that houses an infamous dungeon relic of the international slave trade, Fiatsi was nearly the victim of a contemporary lynching, a fate not unknown for queer and trans people in Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa and the world at large. This greater contextualization in retrospect gave the performance another degree of gravity.
Ewe Indigenous Practices
As mentioned, Fiatsi was born into a royal family of the Ewe people. Within Ghana, a country that since the 1960s has experienced more than 80% conversion from traditional religions to Christianity, the Ewe are believed to be particularly fierce custodians of their indigenous practices and beliefs. While Fiatsi does not self-identify as a “Traditionalist” (the Ghanaian vernacular for someone who follows indigenous religious and other practices), she is outspoken regarding the violence that has been inflicted by imposed colonialist systems, of which Christianity is at the fore. Fiatsi speaks from deep experience as in her younger years she was a Christian minister, before later disavowing that faith.
Ewe indigenous practice is complex, all encompassing, and surpasses contemporary Western conceptions of “religion,” including facets of philosophy, medicine, social structure, and more. Ewe cosmology includes a remote, genderless, ineffable, unapproachable source called Mawu-Sogbo-Lisa. The force of Mawu is disseminated to a pantheon of approachable forces, vodus, which may be interacted with and appealed to by humans. The belief system has been referred to as Vodun and is one of the major sources for Vodou in Haiti, Lukumi (Santeria) in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and other related religious systems throughout the Diaspora.
In Vodun, a prominent class of spirits known as the Mami Wata, or Mother of Waters, is associated with the ocean, lagoons, rivers, and other bodies of water. Mami spirits defy simple gender categorization and may appear as female, male, or of indeterminate gender. Mami spirits are fiercely protective as well as demanding of their “children,” those initiated to their service, and their offerings include sweets, champagne, and perfume. Va-Bene Fiatsi, though not a formal devotee, often invokes the Mami as defiers of Western-imposed binary gender and toxic masculinity, and as caregivers for the otherwise forsaken. Fiatsi’s refusal to accept strict binary gender classifications is rooted in the understanding that these have been imposed by colonial forces, including Christianity. In an act of defiance, irony, and humor, she claims the pronoun sHit (she, he, it).
Returning to the Who Heals the Healers? performance, the overwhelming presence of clay can be reconsidered in the context of Vodun. Clay is ubiquitous in Vodun. Deities or vodus may only be interacted with or appealed to when they are given material foci by a knowledgeable religious specialist. Though this may take various physical forms, the most common by far is a clay pot filled with organic and mineral materials in resonance with a particular spiritual force. In almost all cases the pot must be clay, and plastic, metal, or wood is not considered appropriate. In her study of Vodun material culture, a prominent Vodun diviner and priest told Dr. Suzanne Blier, “Pottery does the things of Vodun.”2
Clay, by way of pottery, becomes a kind of spiritual radio receptor and is the mechanism by which a devotee on the material plane to is able to access forces in the divine realm. Elaborating on this, author Herbert says, “The pottery encodes a complex message of the interaction of humans and spirits, reiterating primary social and spiritual values through its material substance, technology, form, and use but at the same time situating these in a culturally specific context.”3
Dr. Nadia Lovell is one of few authors who has written about Vodun, and has devoted significant attention to the use of clay in religious practice as well as the broader conceptual and cosmological significance and implications of the material. In addition to considering the use of pottery among the Watchie, an Ewe community in Togo, she also draws attention to the wider symbolism and cosmological significance of clay as a material, “. . . the origin of Watchi existence and human origin are at times located in a landscape called bome’, a place like unto a wide field of red clay, where humans return after death in order to be remodeled and recycled back into human existence by Bomeno, the mother of clay, who subsequently returns them to the world of the living.”4
Vulnerabilities and an Overwhelming Presence
This association between clay and motherhood is profoundly significant in Who Heals the Healer? and in Fiatsi’s broader use of clay. As the artist’s song repeatedly calls out to an absent mother for comfort and protection, by covering herself with clay, Fiatsi spiritually enshrouds herself with the essence of Bomeno, the primordial mother, “. . . the archetypal mother of clay.”4 This relationship is amplified as Fiatsi begins to ingest the clay, as well as other organic substances. As the life-force of Bomeno is covering the artist’s body, it is simultaneously being brought inside, and rather than a protective act, this consumption of physical and spiritual force inherent in the clay, from the perspective of the audience seems to be self-destructive. The abandoned child, lost and alone, is driven to consume the maternal essence of clay-Mother in a futile attempt to reconnect, and the visceral response is overpowering. The audience is reduced to the role of helpless, shocked onlookers, without recourse to intervene in the self-destruction or to give comfort, as the artist continues to attempt to sing while struggling to swallow and breath.
Spiritual dimensions of the performance are also present in the biblical associations of clay as the prima materia from which the first humans were formed. As clay forms the body, and in Christianity the body is materialized through transubstantiation and then ingested as a sacrament, Fiatsi’s ingestion of clay becomes a sacramental act. Similarly, the sobolo, visually referencing both blood and red wine, becomes the sacramental drink. In light of this, it is notable that Va-Bene Fiatsi’s past vocation was serving as a Christian minister.
Initiation, in many spiritual traditions, involves the experience of a symbolic death, of the unrefined or previous self, and a rebirth into a new, transformed reality. Fiatsi speaks in similar terms regarding her own experience, “One of my earlier performances with clay, that is why you are mad, left me feeling emboldened, grounded, and resolute in my decisions and chosen path. This same conviction fueled Who Heals the Healer? a decade after, where clay provided me with solace and survival, as I felt I could rely on no one but my own “death.” For me, to truly live or heal, one must first experience a form of death. This experience is deeply empowering and affirming. I hope my performances in clay will encourage my audience to reflect on our shared vulnerabilities as mortals.”
As her performance neared conclusion, Fiatsi continued singing, exited the gallery, and was followed by the audience in somber procession. She made her way outside of the sculpture facility, where the performance took place, and proceeded up the road, in full view of the public, toward the main art building. En route, Fiatsi accepted a bright red robe, but rather than putting it on she threw the robe over her shoulder, regardless of the cold February weather and her nearly unclothed condition. At the top of the steps to the building, she rallied the crowd around her at the bottom of the stairs and gave some concluding remarks in English, briefly summarizing the themes of the performance, before dismissing the audience.
In the performance work of Va-Bene Fiatsi, the concept and presence of clay is visual, visceral, and overwhelming. Clay becomes a giver of sustenance as well as an oppressive, smothering force, signifying the herculean, unsustainable demands inherent in the role of caregiver in the midst of violence that is personal and political; physical and psychological; immediate and consequential.
the author Adam Posnak is studio potter and teaching assistant professor of ceramics and foundations at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He began traveling to Ghana in 2016 and spent the 2018–19 academic year in Ghana with his family. He continues to travel to Ghana regularly, studying and documenting pottery associated with religious practice.
1 www.crazinistartist.com. 2 Blier, Suzanne Preston, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 3 Herbert, Eugenia W., Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. 4 Lovell, Nadia, Cord of Blood: Possession and the Making of Voodoo. London: Pluto Press, 2002.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Va-Bene Fiatsi, known as ‘crazinisT artisT,’ is a performance artist and activist from Ghana, West Africa, whose practice is complex, nuanced, and not easily reducible to a simple description. Fiatsi has achieved great success, both in Ghana and abroad: “crazinisT has performed and exhibited across the globe, including in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany, Netherlands, Cape Verde, USA, Spain, Brazil, France, Sweden, Hungary, Belgium, Luxembourg, Japan, and the UK.
In addition to a rigorous performance art practice, Fiatsi is a prominent activist and spokeswoman for the transgender and wider queer community in Ghana and West Africa. This is of particular timely significance as the Ghanaian government is currently considering a bill that would criminalize LGBTQIA+ so-called “lifestyle,” which is already the case in other West African countries. Fiatsi descends from a royal family of the Ewe People. The Ewe are prominent from Southeastern Ghana, in what is known as the Volta Region, through coastal and central Togo, and into Benin.
Fiatsi is the founder and artistic director of crazinisT artisT studiO, Our Railway Cinema Gallery, and perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR), which “aims at radicalizing the arts and promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and critical thinkers.” pIAR, located in Kumasi, Ghana, allows artists from all over the world to live as a collective, work individually and collaboratively, and to immerse themselves in Ghanaian culture. Additionally, Fiatsi’s studio, which houses the residency program, also serves as a safe house for endangered and at-risk queer youth in Ghana.
Connection, Transformation, and Activism
While my position is in part informed by New Materialism, I prefer to rely directly on indigenous West African and particularly Ewe conceptions of the significance of clay as a lens through which to view Fiatsi’s work, epitomized by a performance given during a residency at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville in 2024. By considering an artist whose work is immanently contemporary in terms of message, theory, process, intended audience, social practice, and venue, by way of indigenous West African ontologies and epistemologies, the false binary of “traditional” versus “contemporary” art, often applied subjectively to artists from West Africa, can be challenged and dismantled.
Fiatsi describes the beginning of her relationship with clay as conceptually and spiritually imbued material, thus, “My journey with clay began around 2010/2011 during my university studies in painting and sculpture at the KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), initially as an academic requirement. However, I soon discovered a spiritual and transformative quality in its materiality, developing a deep connection that later evolved beyond its use in sculpture and performance.”
In February 2024, Va-Bene Fiatsi was a visiting artist at the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. During this residency, she delivered a lecture regarding her performance work, research, social practice, and activism; conducted studio visits and critiques with undergraduate and graduate students from various areas within the School of Art; and gave a performance titled Who Heals the Healer?. This work confronted the under-recognized trauma of those who engage in activism and advocacy, especially within the context of LGBTQIA+ concerns in Ghana, where this community is currently under attack in the public discourse and facing potential criminalization by proposed legislation. For Fiatsi, clay is intrinsically linked to the body and its transformative potential: “By 2013, as I started confronting both the university community and public spaces on queerness and the violence we face, clay returned to me as a powerful spiritual grounding, death, and life. It reshaped my understanding of the body’s fluidity and capacity for transformation and our connection to the ancestors. This resonated deeply with our burial rituals, which state, “anyie ne nye, anyi ke na ga trɔa azu” (You are clay and you will return to clay). This coincided with a period when I had metaphorically “declared myself dead” to confront the challenges of a transitional journey, and radical artivism while anticipating a future of “untold horrors” that materialised a decade later into an anti-LGBTQIA+ bill.”
Who Heals the Healer?
The one-woman, 33-minute performance, Who Heals the Healer?, took place in a small on-campus gallery. When the performance commenced, the artist emerged from a room located down the hall from the gallery, immediately breaking the fourth wall by entering the audience’s space. Fiatsi was clothed in a loincloth and entirely covered with clay slurry and bits of solid clay. As she made her way down the hallway toward the gallery, she began to sing a refrain that would continue throughout the piece, a plaintive lament in Ewe language of a child calling out to an estranged mother:
“Naye Naye Naye Mother, Mother, Mother
Naye Naye yeee repeated
Ne do Agutoa nu de if you reach the peak of Agu mountain
Ne se gbedidia de, Nanya be nye le yor wo
if you hear any voice, you should know that I am the one calling you
Danye Danye Danye Mother, Mother, Mother (different Ewe dialect)
Danye Danye Danye repeated
Ne do Agutoa nu de if you reach the peak of Agu mountain
Ne se gbedidia de, Nanya be nye le yor wo
if you hear any voice, you should know that I am the one calling you
Nornye Nornye Nornye Mother, Mother Mother (in different Ewe dialect)
Nornye Nornye Nornye repeated
Ne do Agutoa nu de if you reach the peak of Agu mountain
Ne se gbedidia de, Nanya be nye le yor wo
if you hear any voice, you should know that I am the one calling you”
Fiatsi sang in a high, lilting voice and the pain implied by the lyrics was palpable. Portions of the artist’s face and body were obscured by applied clay. The combined effect of voice and appearance was fantastical, otherworldly, and unsettling. After singing the initial refrains, Fiatsi began to pack her mouth with soft clay, and the continued singing was reduced to humming the melody as Fiatsi made her way into the gallery space, followed in procession by the audience. The gallery’s entrance wall was entirely glass, and the audience was divided between those who entered the gallery as companions and witnesses accompanying the artist, and those who remained outside and removed.
Arranged on the gallery floor was a wide circle made from shot-glass-sized cups containing a popular West African drink made from hibiscus flowers, ginger, and other herbs and spices, known as sobolo in Ghana and by other names throughout West Africa. Also piled in the middle of the floor was the residue from making the tea. Audience members were invited to drink from the small cups in a reverential, sacramental fashion. As Fiatsi continued to make a slow procession around the space, she would pause to either attempt to drink the sobolo or eat the leftover hibiscus leaves and herbs. The clay previously placed in her mouth obstructed her ingestion and singing and she was periodically overcome with fits of gagging until the clay and other substances could be slowly swallowed. Fiatsi would then put additional clay slurry into her mouth from a container in the room. During all of this, the singing never completely stopped, except in momentary fits of coughing.
For viewers, the performance was viscerally and emotionally overpowering. The effect was of viewing, and by extension being complicit in, self-destruction brought about by sheer loneliness and despair. Though the appearance of the performer was uncanny, and the physical trauma of ingesting clay and other materials was shocking, rather than repulsion, the audience was overcome by compassion. In light of the title, Who Heals the Healer?, and the plaintive call for an absent parent, and with the knowledge of Fiatsi’s activism and social practice, the existential pain of a leader at the forefront of civil rights activism was palpable.
The following night during Fiatsi’s public lecture, another layer of trauma was made evident. For Fiatsi, physical danger is not just theoretical. She has been, and continues to be, subject to the aggressions perpetrated against trans people traveling internationally, including questioning her identity, invasive searches, and detention. In the same town that houses an infamous dungeon relic of the international slave trade, Fiatsi was nearly the victim of a contemporary lynching, a fate not unknown for queer and trans people in Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa and the world at large. This greater contextualization in retrospect gave the performance another degree of gravity.
Ewe Indigenous Practices
As mentioned, Fiatsi was born into a royal family of the Ewe people. Within Ghana, a country that since the 1960s has experienced more than 80% conversion from traditional religions to Christianity, the Ewe are believed to be particularly fierce custodians of their indigenous practices and beliefs. While Fiatsi does not self-identify as a “Traditionalist” (the Ghanaian vernacular for someone who follows indigenous religious and other practices), she is outspoken regarding the violence that has been inflicted by imposed colonialist systems, of which Christianity is at the fore. Fiatsi speaks from deep experience as in her younger years she was a Christian minister, before later disavowing that faith.
Ewe indigenous practice is complex, all encompassing, and surpasses contemporary Western conceptions of “religion,” including facets of philosophy, medicine, social structure, and more. Ewe cosmology includes a remote, genderless, ineffable, unapproachable source called Mawu-Sogbo-Lisa. The force of Mawu is disseminated to a pantheon of approachable forces, vodus, which may be interacted with and appealed to by humans. The belief system has been referred to as Vodun and is one of the major sources for Vodou in Haiti, Lukumi (Santeria) in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and other related religious systems throughout the Diaspora.
In Vodun, a prominent class of spirits known as the Mami Wata, or Mother of Waters, is associated with the ocean, lagoons, rivers, and other bodies of water. Mami spirits defy simple gender categorization and may appear as female, male, or of indeterminate gender. Mami spirits are fiercely protective as well as demanding of their “children,” those initiated to their service, and their offerings include sweets, champagne, and perfume. Va-Bene Fiatsi, though not a formal devotee, often invokes the Mami as defiers of Western-imposed binary gender and toxic masculinity, and as caregivers for the otherwise forsaken. Fiatsi’s refusal to accept strict binary gender classifications is rooted in the understanding that these have been imposed by colonial forces, including Christianity. In an act of defiance, irony, and humor, she claims the pronoun sHit (she, he, it).
Returning to the Who Heals the Healers? performance, the overwhelming presence of clay can be reconsidered in the context of Vodun. Clay is ubiquitous in Vodun. Deities or vodus may only be interacted with or appealed to when they are given material foci by a knowledgeable religious specialist. Though this may take various physical forms, the most common by far is a clay pot filled with organic and mineral materials in resonance with a particular spiritual force. In almost all cases the pot must be clay, and plastic, metal, or wood is not considered appropriate. In her study of Vodun material culture, a prominent Vodun diviner and priest told Dr. Suzanne Blier, “Pottery does the things of Vodun.”2
Clay, by way of pottery, becomes a kind of spiritual radio receptor and is the mechanism by which a devotee on the material plane to is able to access forces in the divine realm. Elaborating on this, author Herbert says, “The pottery encodes a complex message of the interaction of humans and spirits, reiterating primary social and spiritual values through its material substance, technology, form, and use but at the same time situating these in a culturally specific context.”3
Dr. Nadia Lovell is one of few authors who has written about Vodun, and has devoted significant attention to the use of clay in religious practice as well as the broader conceptual and cosmological significance and implications of the material. In addition to considering the use of pottery among the Watchie, an Ewe community in Togo, she also draws attention to the wider symbolism and cosmological significance of clay as a material, “. . . the origin of Watchi existence and human origin are at times located in a landscape called bome’, a place like unto a wide field of red clay, where humans return after death in order to be remodeled and recycled back into human existence by Bomeno, the mother of clay, who subsequently returns them to the world of the living.”4
Vulnerabilities and an Overwhelming Presence
This association between clay and motherhood is profoundly significant in Who Heals the Healer? and in Fiatsi’s broader use of clay. As the artist’s song repeatedly calls out to an absent mother for comfort and protection, by covering herself with clay, Fiatsi spiritually enshrouds herself with the essence of Bomeno, the primordial mother, “. . . the archetypal mother of clay.”4 This relationship is amplified as Fiatsi begins to ingest the clay, as well as other organic substances. As the life-force of Bomeno is covering the artist’s body, it is simultaneously being brought inside, and rather than a protective act, this consumption of physical and spiritual force inherent in the clay, from the perspective of the audience seems to be self-destructive. The abandoned child, lost and alone, is driven to consume the maternal essence of clay-Mother in a futile attempt to reconnect, and the visceral response is overpowering. The audience is reduced to the role of helpless, shocked onlookers, without recourse to intervene in the self-destruction or to give comfort, as the artist continues to attempt to sing while struggling to swallow and breath.
Spiritual dimensions of the performance are also present in the biblical associations of clay as the prima materia from which the first humans were formed. As clay forms the body, and in Christianity the body is materialized through transubstantiation and then ingested as a sacrament, Fiatsi’s ingestion of clay becomes a sacramental act. Similarly, the sobolo, visually referencing both blood and red wine, becomes the sacramental drink. In light of this, it is notable that Va-Bene Fiatsi’s past vocation was serving as a Christian minister.
Initiation, in many spiritual traditions, involves the experience of a symbolic death, of the unrefined or previous self, and a rebirth into a new, transformed reality. Fiatsi speaks in similar terms regarding her own experience, “One of my earlier performances with clay, that is why you are mad, left me feeling emboldened, grounded, and resolute in my decisions and chosen path. This same conviction fueled Who Heals the Healer? a decade after, where clay provided me with solace and survival, as I felt I could rely on no one but my own “death.” For me, to truly live or heal, one must first experience a form of death. This experience is deeply empowering and affirming. I hope my performances in clay will encourage my audience to reflect on our shared vulnerabilities as mortals.”
As her performance neared conclusion, Fiatsi continued singing, exited the gallery, and was followed by the audience in somber procession. She made her way outside of the sculpture facility, where the performance took place, and proceeded up the road, in full view of the public, toward the main art building. En route, Fiatsi accepted a bright red robe, but rather than putting it on she threw the robe over her shoulder, regardless of the cold February weather and her nearly unclothed condition. At the top of the steps to the building, she rallied the crowd around her at the bottom of the stairs and gave some concluding remarks in English, briefly summarizing the themes of the performance, before dismissing the audience.
In the performance work of Va-Bene Fiatsi, the concept and presence of clay is visual, visceral, and overwhelming. Clay becomes a giver of sustenance as well as an oppressive, smothering force, signifying the herculean, unsustainable demands inherent in the role of caregiver in the midst of violence that is personal and political; physical and psychological; immediate and consequential.
To learn more about Va-Bene Fiatsi and her work, visit www.crazinistartist.com or follow on Instagram @crazinist_artist.
the author Adam Posnak is studio potter and teaching assistant professor of ceramics and foundations at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He began traveling to Ghana in 2016 and spent the 2018–19 academic year in Ghana with his family. He continues to travel to Ghana regularly, studying and documenting pottery associated with religious practice.
1 www.crazinistartist.com.
2 Blier, Suzanne Preston, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
3 Herbert, Eugenia W., Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.
4 Lovell, Nadia, Cord of Blood: Possession and the Making of Voodoo. London: Pluto Press, 2002.
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