Interview with El Anatsui
Curator Alisa LaGamma talks to artist El Anatsui about his work, including the sculpture Between Earth and Heaven, which was recently installed in the African art galleries.
Episode Date: January 21, 2008
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Episode Transcript
Alisa LaGamma: Hello, this is Alisa LaGamma and I'm the curator of African art here at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'm with El Anatsui, who's visiting us from Nigeria this week. It's the week that he has opened a major exhibition of his work and it's the day that he's just installed a wonderful piece in the Museum's collection that we acquired in 2006.
The title of this work that you created in 2006 is Between Heaven and Earth. Can you explain a little bit how you selected this particular title for the work that's on view here?
El Anatsui: The fact that is this, we live in many dimensions of the world: the physical one—solid earth and with bone and skin—and then the cyberworld, which is intangible. I think most of the time we are caught in between the two of them, we are left in some abeyance. We are left between heaven, which I think the cyberworld, you know, the nearest description of, and earth. And in kind of trying to get at this title, I looked at the elements that I used in the work and saw that a proportion of elements which were open, you could see through them.
Alisa LaGamma: They were transparent.
El Anatsui: You know, they were more transparent than the lower one—which is the lower section, which is dense, you know. That's the physical and then the ethereal.
Alisa LaGamma: One of the things that strikes me when
