Flagellaria is part of a new series of works by Kampala (Uganda)-based artist Sanaa Gateja that was inspired by a series of booklets on East African vegetation published by the British Crown Agents for Overseas Development and Administration in the 1920s and 1930s- and given to him by an antique dealer friend. These were originally widely distributed in all major cities in Britain as well as in the then colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Gateja selected a few of the mass replicated pen drawings, transforming them into unique works of art, large scale lush wall works that have material and haptic qualities.

To make Flagellaria, hundreds of paper conical beads have been meticulously stitched on barkcloth- a material made out of an East African Ficus tree through ancient rituals dating from pre-colonial Ugandan Royalty times that involve sacred music and dance. The beads are made by the artist studio’s community and are the result of a long process that includes forming, tinting, and painting each of them by hand from paper recycled from newspapers, magazines, and popular books that are piled up in the studio for that purpose.

In referring indirectly to the British Empire’s mass-market botanic surveys, the artist questions the historical appropriation and commodification of the East- African nature that grew with the colonial Imperial agenda. With the sumptuous Flagellaria however, he opposes that humble local plants have to be worshipped, especially at a time when the East African landscape is threatening to change dramatically due to the global climate crisis.
Yet as a reader of Edouard Glissant, Gateja proposes, as an artist, positive answers to the philosopher’s concept of Mondialite: his deeply original practice itself that encourages craftsmanship, management of resources, community cohesion, and the reconnection with local symbols and history- are the elements that according to him allow him to engage positively in the global dialogue between time and place.