Vrouw uit Congo 1620 - 1664

Editor: Here we have "Vrouw uit Congo" - or "Woman from Congo," made sometime between 1620 and 1664, an engraving by Stefano della Bella. There's a lot of text and context crammed onto this single printed sheet. What jumps out at you? Curator: Well, I think what’s compelling is the almost dreamlike quality, isn't it? She looks both powerful and vulnerable at the same time. It feels like this Stefano della Bella fellow may have constructed an idea as much as he has made a depiction. What do you make of her clothes, eh? Are those knee-high boots the height of fashion back in Congo in 1650? I’m being facetious of course, this piece, and so many others from this period, remind us of the biased perspective Europeans had when encountering other cultures. What purpose do you imagine an image like this would serve? Editor: I suppose I hadn’t considered it like that. I imagined that it was created to catalogue something… perhaps a record of places "discovered", or perhaps even something anthropological? I suppose it wasn’t… Curator: Cataloging is certainly one way to consider it, yet how accurate is that catalog, is my question. I find that I am less and less interested in the so-called facts about artworks like these, and more and more fascinated with the hidden language embedded in them. Language that tells a clearer story about how we operate as humans, the stories we choose to tell about others, and crucially, what these stories conveniently omit. Perhaps the image is only 10% the woman it purports to depict and 90% the worldview of its author. Editor: So really it's about looking beyond the image and understanding the circumstances in which it was made. Thank you. Curator: Exactly! And isn’t that half the fun?