Ila Colley
Ila Colley works across spatial art, architecture and poetics. Her investigative drawings, texts, sculptures and installations attempt to probe the social and political concerns that manifest in our spatial inhabitings. Her written and visual work has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies. She has studied and worked in Edinburgh, Copenhagen and Stockholm and is currently in Cumbria between three pints of weather.
Ila has created three text-based responses to the project.
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From Local to Global Exhibition works
Ila Colley is interested in how historic objects and social histories can help create new interconnected narratives. Here Colley’s work examines how colonising processes of extraction and exploitation can be explored conceptually in sculptural form.
Ila Colley
enclosure a: the patron, 2022
760 x 600 mm
Concrete blocks, plaster, found objects, embroidery thread and metal jewellery chain
Colley’s three enclosure sculptures evoke human, geological and transactional situations. They examine parallel colonising processes of extraction (of resources, information, labour) and exploitation (the personal impacts on identity, dignity, experiences such as love or pain), particularly as they relate to behaviours we might recognise in ourselves. This sculpture recalls a plastic roll-a-coin donation box you might find on the seafront. After the coin is rolled it is hidden from view and impossible to know exactly where it goes or how it is used. In this sense, Colley addresses links between commercial and conservation processes in the Congo region, questioning the repercussions of our own acts of giving.
Elizabeth Lunstrum coined the term ‘green militarization’ to encompass “the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation effort” ... Rather than misleading consumers into buying a fairly harmless product, customers are misled into funnelling money to military corporations through avenues such as donation campaigns, documentaries, and ecotourism.
Emily Jones, from Capital and Control: Neocolonialism Through the Militarization of African Wildlife Conservation, 2021
Within Colley’s sculptures are parts of a deconstructed umbrella. A number of Harrison’s photographs include a white umbrella. Seemingly innocuous, this object can be read as a prop to elevate the white man, protecting him from the elements, a tool to measure objects (or people), a pointing implement or even a weapon, separating and othering the people of the Congo from Harrison himself. In these works, the trophy-making process is turned on the umbrella, skinned, de-boned, turned into an artefact that memorialises violence and entrapment.
Ila Colley
enclosure b: the vanishing, 2022
440 x 1470 mm
Concrete blocks, plaster, found objects, embroidery thread and metal jewellery chain
Fifteen concrete bricks that represent a blocked-up doorway in Woodend which enclosed a number of forgotten taxidermied heads from the Harrison collection. The doorway represents the potential for museums to conceal as well as display. Erasure is understood here as a form of enclosure, the result of plundering and hoarding objects away in colonial collections. Erasure is also used by the powerful to stifle knowledge and resistance. This opens up questions about Harrison, how casually he discarded life, as well as a need to scrutinise the not-so post-colonial museum, accountability and issues of repatriation.
Eternal glory to the fighters for national liberation!
Long live independence and African unity!
Long live the independent and sovereign Congo!
Patrice Lumumba, speech at the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence, transcribed and translated from French, 30 June 1960 (201 days before his murder).
Ila Colley
enclosure c: pressures metal, 2022
500mm x 540mm
Concrete blocks, plaster, found objects, embroidery thread and metal jewellery chain
Gold and other precious metals and minerals are often mined illegalling in the Congo. Carved into the blocks are contours akin to open pit mines used to source these precious metals. The hands and sand timer suggest the constant flow of labour hours. This cycle of extraction, consumption and disposal is unsustainable.
It also drives local conflicts and the clearances of indigenous land. The thread links Western consumers of jewellery, electronics and vehicles, all reliant on the Congo’s natural resources, and the people who toil to extract the base ingredients of such products.
The rendering of nonbeings in colonial extractive practices through the designation of inhuman or geologic life, its exchange and circulation, demonstrates what Christina Sharp (2009) calls the “monstrous intimacy” of the subjective powers of geology, where gold shows up as bodies and bodies are the surplus of mineralogical extraction.
Kathryn Yussoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2019