The Trouble I Didn’t Know I Needed
Disrupting high art to defeat erasure: the bet of Kachusha of Philadelphia.
Chapter I. The bell
First I hear the bell. A small bell, ringing, cracking open the silent halls of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I try to follow her music. On my way from the Japanese Kabuki to the American art section, I pass the marble Angel of Purity, wings wide open. I step into the next gallery, slightly darker and slightly narrower, and there he was: I catch a glimpse of his wide-open wings. One in front, one in the back, and the bell, the small little chiming bell, is hanging from his neck, overlooking the wings. The one he wears on his back – his cape – says “Equality is our birthright”. The one in front writes “Equality right now”. The wings of Kachusha are the wings of equality. Suddenly, all the art on the walls starts to vanish, leaving room for another kind of creation, an induction into something of a holier substance.
For a moment, the sound of the bell makes me flinch. What could possibly divert me from my so-cherished solitary artistic expedition, my so-sacred artist date, my moment of insight and solitude and inspiration I had been looking for all week? The bell tinkle made me flinch not so much for the sound itself, but for the significance it holds, for what such a sound means in this particular place. A museum. Theater of the magnificent art of past centuries that has shaped our nations and identities. Grandiose museums, where we, from the earliest age, are supposed to find the symbols of our greatness as one unified people, one nation. A national and international institution of codification and solemnity that doesn’t even need to remind us that we must stay silent, that we must be quiet, and observe the Art and everything it has to tell us — if we are willing to keep our mouths shut.
The miniature Liberty Bell of Philadelphia, around Kachusha’s neck, was here to tell us something different. On that Sunday afternoon, as the first cherry blossoms of the year spread across the city, on a day like any other for the customary family cultural outings, on the day of my first visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the bell rang to break a silence, an unbearable silence. It came to shake a world, our unbearable world. It came to trouble our numbness, our absolute, terrifying, insufferable numbness.
Chapter II. The man
I come closer, looking at his cape quite the same way I had been looking at the art that surrounded it in the museum’s hallways. Once close enough, I walk towards him and I ask him if I can take his picture. He asks me why, “I’m a Philadelphian,” he says. I’m surprised by the way he refers to his city as his first identity denominator, his anchor in reality. This sense of space belonging felt foreign to me, as I’d never come close to thinking about any city I’ve lived in as something that defined my identity — and I’ve come to realize how much I defined myself more by a sort of sweet errance, an absence of clear territoriality, than by any identified piece of land. But I realize how much one needs to identify in relation to the land. Your land, the one you’ve built connections with and have anchored in over the years and centuries, shapes itself with you and for you — sometimes against you. Kachusha was a Philadelphian at his core, a Philadelphian, and an American. He had been dubbed “Kachusha The American” by one of his friends, inspired by the Jasper Johns flag that he would sometimes carry on his body as he walked. The Target.
I ask what the bell was about. He explains about the Liberty Bell, its crack, its sound, its Americanness. This marks the start of our wandering together in the museum. Our own errance begins.
Chapter III. The journey
Les Tournesols, Van Gogh.
“The speed of Van Gogh’s work was driven by enthusiasm and necessity since the flowers were destined to wilt and fade.” © Philadelphia Museum of Art
[Pictured above] Kachusha observes one of Van Gogh’s most famous pieces in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A time of mental health hardship, followed by a what he describes as a moment of “awkwardness”, initiated Kachusha’s art process.
Kachusha’s art discovery and journey started from a place of mental hardship, and slowly shaped as a journey toward mental health and healing. As we discuss the hard quest for mental health in a world filled with injustices, he leads me to Van Gogh and his Sunflowers and his Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and his Baby Marcelle. In French, sunflowers are “Tournesols,” which can be literally translated as “turning towards the sun.” Like a sunflower, Kachusha saw the light through art and started radiating, speaking a truth, using the most powerful art medium he had – his own body – as a canvas to show the world the possibilities his fight for equality unveils.
The first time he came to display his signs in the museum was fraught with anxiety. It was only a few days after another tragic moment for the United States, when charges against a police officer responsible for the death of a young man were dropped – again. The cape Kachusha was wearing that day repeatedly said “Freedom.” Shortly after he entered the museum, a security guard approached him and asked him if he could remove what he was wearing, or simply leave. As hard as it is to imagine a cloak of freedom that scares people away, it is heartbreaking to live in a society that is less terrified by the unjust rules that govern us than by the expression of compassion for the oppressed. A society where we would rather accommodate ourselves to laws that destroy us and our social fabric than embrace a call for freedom and equality that could liberate all of us.
After that moment that he describes as a moment of “awkwardness”, Kachusha became hesitant to expose himself again, but soon realized that his outfit became like a second skin, a skin that he could not take off as easily. A skin that asked for freedom, for equality, and that hopefully could protect him from the brutality of our world. A skin that would perhaps protect him from the scrutiny of his own skin, a skin that is not of the “right” color, the right substance, the right heritage. But what is left to do when the very skin that is supposed to protect us terrifies the other?
Chapter IV. Reinventing art
As we continue our stroll, Kachusha tells me that his performance is about building an experience for the five senses, in order to startle the spectators and challenge their role, to involve them in the process of reflection. “I became the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s own ‘Banksy’.” Kachusha, like Banksy, disrupts the comfortable and invites the viewer to a truly unique experience. Kachusha’s art rewrites the rules of art itself and invites us to think beyond the precedents and out of our comfort zone; a comfort created only for a few.
His art blurs the line between fashion, design, and urban space. Through the display of words on his own body, he uses himself as a canvas to create a world of possibilities, and becomes part of the museum just as the museum becomes him. His art prompts us to question our own place in the museum and by extension forces us to question and reexamine the realities of our world and to reconsider our role in it. Museums are microcosms of a reality that transcends them, they are windows into our world, encapsulating the injustices and inequalities that have pervaded it over the centuries.
Museums are a place of imagination and creativity, yet they also shelter a history of exclusion, theft, injustice and violence. Kashusha tries to bring in an alternative, a utopia of what seems and is possible: Imagining a new world, resisting what is presented as natural, reasonable, or self-evident, and challenging the status quo. His canvas invites us to think beyond and across walls, frontiers, or biases. By transcending frontiers, his art vibrates through the resonance of a troubled world and captures the universal. In 2018, when the movement of the Yellow Vests inundated the cities and countryside of France, sparked one of its most vibrant acts of insurgency and prompted a wave of resistance, in a country that has been gradually reshuffling the cards of social welfare for the sake of neoliberalism, Kachusha created his own gilet jaune in solidarity and camaraderie with other citizens of the world, thirsty for equality and justice, vibrating to the same frequency that resonated with citizens of his country.
Kachusha’s art is not just an aesthetic practice. It’s a mantra, a purpose that he cannot not carry. It’s his core that he cannot not display. His art is a body reclamation, transcending tragic experiences of police brutality, of injustice, of violence, into expressions of hope, showing and enacting possible change.
Chapter V. The trouble
“You gotta speak your truth.”
Inside and outside the Philadelphia museum, Kachusha builds a social experiment, an invitation to a radical otherness, a bittersweet awkwardness.
In the Western world, we increasingly face barriers in interacting with real people in the real world – when we don’t create them ourselves. We build fences, like ramparts rising against the potential invader into our own small protected world, not noticing how increasingly isolated we become. Over connection, we prioritize our own so-called comfort and we show indifference. We are losing our capacity to be empaths, and we feel more comfortable asking someone to leave or get out of sight than to understand their reality. The encounter we tolerate is limited to our screen, easily transformed into smoke screens, ghosting the other or inflicting on them all kinds of spooky behavior that we would not have imagined doing in reality. We bury our heads in the sand. We lose touch. We neglect to feel the weight of tragedy of people dying around us, sometimes just a few meters away from us. We become numb to the most extreme violence, desensitized by the amount of death and injustice we have tragically surrounded ourselves with.
But what if we take the bet and start seeing the unpredictable, uncomfortable and troubling truth of our ordinary world? That may be how we will, ultimately, create pathways to realities even furthest away, and create the authentic and deepened connection that we all need as human beings.
On this Sunday afternoon, on my first visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it would have been so easy to go on with my ordinary art tour. To stay in line, “stay put”, keep looking at the beautiful art I had paid $25 to see, and to simply subscribe to the capitalistic demand that has commodified our cultural world. It would have been easy not to face the possibility of a cruel awkwardness, not to take the risk of creating a likely very embarrassing interaction, and to stay in my “comfort” zone. Yet not taking risks is missing the chance it takes to live something truly extraordinary. It’s to miss the chance to fulfill my mission in the world. “Rester dans le rang” as we say in French, “follow the script” is the easy part. But it is missing out on the truth.
It was a truly extraordinary moment, precisely because it wasn’t extraordinary at all. It was the most ordinary thing I could ever have done – talking to a stranger in a museum who had something to say. It was here, and it is always everywhere, all around us, the small extraordinariness hiding in every ordinary fragment of our lives.
If Kachusha taught me one thing, it’s the importance of creating and encouraging the necessary friction in our world and in our daily interactions. The friction that can break the indifference and catapult the cruel silence that surrounds us and that prevents us from seeing the truth. He taught me about the importance of the display, of expressing one’s truth instead of burying it under a pile of discomfort. As long as you want to keep it inside, your work – your truth – may beautifully brew itself but might not ever be appreciated for its true flavor, until it’s too infused to the point it gets bitter.
The display of your work is what creates the connection between you and me. So here I am, displaying my work, expressing my truth, disrupting my fears, troubling my numbness. I’m hopeful that someday, displaying my work and truth might also help someone, might also heal the way it healed me.
“Kachusha. Where does your name come from?” I asked him before we parted ways. “From Zambia,” he replied. “And what does it mean?”
“Troublesome.”
