Ava and Gabriel: An Exegesis
by Edward Akintola Hubbard
Part adaptation, part analysis, part cultural critique, each of the five “chapters” of the program Ava + Gabriel: An Exegesis curated by DARKMATTER explored different facets and thematic concerns raised in the original film such as Dutch colonialism and its discontents, linguistic and cultural creolization, artistic freedom and censorship, and the sensual and tragic aspects of love. With no master of ceremonies to provide an introduction or contextualization, each chapter plunged the audience in the Stedelijk’s Teijin Auditorium into a visceral experience featuring different performers employing a dizzying array of media and methods.
Fig. 1. Felix de Rooy with Edward Akintola Hubbard of DARKMATTER. Photo: Noël Schut.
Fig. 2. Felix de Rooy with members of DARKMATTER. Photo: Noël Schut.
Meanwhile, during the technical breaks of approximately 30-35 minutes, the audience was ushered out of the auditorium and into the adjoining space containing the museum’s intricate Felix de Rooy retrospective, Apocalypse. At the end of a long pathway through the labyrinthine exhibition was a special Annotations Room with Ava & Gabriel: A Love Story playing on loop. A selection of books and documents provided historical and sociological background to the performances and to the original film to which they pay homage, including texts on Curaçaoan history, Dutch slavery and colonialism, creole linguistics, and interviews with de Rooy.
What gave the proceedings a unique feeling was the appearance of the artist, Felix de Rooy, whose visible excitement, joy, and gratitude to the performers was evident throughout the five-hour program.
In this romantic drama, the story revolves around Gabriel Goedbloed, a painter from Suriname, who comes to Curaçao with the purpose of creating a mural for a church. As he embarks on his artistic endeavor, he chooses Ava Recordina, a teacher, to be his model for depicting the Virgin Mary. This decision stirs up a commotion among the local bourgeoisie and also causes tension among Ava’s lovers. The controversy arises from the fact that someone of African heritage is being portrayed as the Virgin Mary for the church’s mural.
Chapter 1
Fig. 3. Vernon Chatlein, from Willemstad Rap. Photo: Noël Schut.
The first chapter, entitled Willemstad Rap, combined essay, film, and a live musical performance as an analytical homage to de Rooy and to the film Ava & Gabriel. The film projected onto the backdrop of the auditorium consisted of the stunning aerial, terrestrial and underwater visuals of Curaçaoan filmmaker David van Delden interspersed with Delden’s footage of de Rooy performing his poetry, historical-archival footage of Curaçao, and key scenes from Ava & Gabriel: A Love Story. Durwin Lynch, a researcher on Afro-Creole healing practices in Curaçao, provided narration that provided historical, sociological, and stylistic background for a contemporary understanding of the film as an important work of postcolonial critique. Lynch’s scintillating voice and deeply affecting vocal delivery was perfectly suited to the delicate live score performed by Curaçaoan composer and percussionist Vernon Chatlein, performing on traditional Afro-Curaçaoan percussion and wind instruments in a pool of dark blue light.
Chapter 2
Fig. 4. Najendra ‘Nash’ Caldera, from Polyglossia: Island of Babel. Photo: Mohamad Khezri Moghadam.
For the second chapter, entitled Polyglossia: Island of Babel, visual and performance artist Najendra ‘Nash’ Caldera brought the experience of Curaçaoan polyglossia – i.e., the coexistence of multiple languages in one society, community or area – to three-dimensional and multi-media life before an audience encouraged to stand or sit on the side lines of the Teijin Auditorium. Nash’s work integrates her recorded and live voices into a highly complex performance-installation involving multiple video monitors and culturally evocative and politically charged stage props like a chaise lounge draped in Dutch royal orange velvet and an altar composed of objects of ritual value in Afro-Caribbean spirituality. The piece ruminates on Curaçao’s Tower of Babel-like linguistic plurality and code-switching as vividly depicted throughout the film Ava & Gabriel, plus, it also underscores de Rooy’s pointed use of the native language of Curaçao, Papiamentu, as a linguistic artefact of Black resistance to European domination.
Chapter 3
Fig. 5. Fazle Shairmahomed, Goddess Coco and Paolo Yao, from Syncretism: Obia Woman/Creole Madonna. Photo: Noël Schut.
Fig. 6. Zobayda, from Syncretism: Obia Woman/Creole Madonna. Photo: Noël Schut.
The Exegesis‘ third chapter, Syncretism: Obia Woman/Creole Madonna, took the form of a partly improvised performance-workshop led by Analemma, a dance troupe specializing in Afro-diasporic and decolonizing dance ritual that centers queer people of color. Embodied spirituality, transience, and flow – important features of Afro-creole possession rites – are key to grasping the power of the troupe’s electrifying performance. To preserve the viscerality of Analemma’s hyperkinetic productions, artistic director Fazle Shairmahomed deliberately assembles an entirely different group of performers each time. With Syncretism: Obia Woman/Creole Madonna, three performers and a live DJ illustrated de Rooy’s subtextual argument that the climate of clerical-colonial domination depicted in Ava & Gabriel has always been vulnerable to infusion and radical contamination by African-based belief systems.
Chapter 4
Fig. 7. Rachwill Breidel, from Colonial Education: Mijn Zusje is Blond. Photo: Noël Schut.
Fig. 8. Ciro Goudsmit, from Colonial Education: Mijn Zusje is Blond. Photo: Noël Schut.
One of the most poignant and disturbing scenes in the film Ava & Gabriel is one in which a white nun is teaching Dutch to a classroom of Curaçaoan children. In the call-and-response style typical of primary-level education in European colonies, the teacher urges the pupils to repeat the phrase “Mijn Zusje is Blond!” (My Sister is blonde!). For the Fourth chapter, sound artists Rachwill Breidel and Ciro Goudsmit used this tiny grain to build what was perhaps the day’s most abstract performance – a sonic lecture entitled Colonial Education: Mijn Zusje is Blond. They shook the foundations of the Stedelijk, both figuratively and literally (yes, there was an official noise complaint), by completely disassembling the scene from the film and reconstituting it in the auditorium in almost total darkness, with a thunderous, base-driven electronic soundscape and a dancing audience. The glowing silhouette of Ciro, dressed in a futuristic silver suit wired with tiny light bulbs and pacing rhythmically back and forth like an automaton at the center of the room, was a deconstructed image of the nun.
Chapter 5
Fig. 9. Taneesha Sijmons and Roxana Verwey, from Final: Abominable Acts. Photo: Mohamad Khezri Moghadam.
Fig. 10. Taneesha Sijmons, from Final: Abominable Acts. Photo: Mohamad Khezri Moghadam.
The fifth and last chapter, Final: Abominable Acts, was an adaptation of the tragic characters of Gabriel (the painter) and Ava (his model) to an entirely new political context. Transforming the audience into voyeurs, this performance placed Gabriel in the role of a non-binary pornographic artist who films, paints and makes love to the moving body of their model and lover Ava, a pole-dancer. This piece was a meditation on the violence of censorship and an expansion of its conceptual application, from artworks to human bodies. In costumes by Nigerian fashion designer Papa Oyeyemi (of the acclaimed label Maxivive) inspired by those from the film, Gabriel “films” Ava as she undresses and then paints her body in primary colors and fluorescent pigments reminiscent of the film. They perform a slow, highly sensual duet to a soundtrack assembled by Cabo Verdean beat-maker Ângelo Mendes, writhing around on a floor littered with actual pages taken from Uganda’s recently passed Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2023. A live feed from Gabriel’s prop camera was projected onto the auditorium’s backdrop throughout the performance, mimicking the effect of the “frame within a frame” in the movie Ava & Gabriel where Gabriel’s canvas continuously plays the role of a second screen. The climax of the performance came when Ava mounted a pole installed in the auditorium and performed a dazzling pole-dance awash in a frenzy of colored lights. The piece calls urgent attention to the role played by the evangelical Christian movement – and the European and North American governments that actively sponsor it by providing millions of dollars in aid to Christian charities – in the wave of violent anti-queer legislation that has swept through Africa and other parts of its diaspora, criminalizing same-sex acts and marriage, queer allyships and advocates of LGBTQ+ rights, and by the same token, queer art and queer artists.
About the Author
Edward Akintola Hubbard is co-founder and artistic director of Amsterdam-based artist collective DARKMATTER and Assistant Professor of Arts and Society at Utrecht University. He is an anthropologist, artist and curator whose scholarly interests and artistic practice, experimental ethnography, exist at the intersection of social anthropology and contemporary art. He holds a BA (Hons) in Mass Communication from the University of the West Indies – Mona (Jamaica), an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago (USA), and a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University (USA).
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