Venice, Oceania's first major exhibition of command sticks at Palazzo Franchetti

A major exhibition dedicated to theethnic art of Oceania: titled Power & Prestige. Symbols of Command in Oceania, and runs from October 16, 2021 to March 13, 2022 in Venice, at Palazzo Franchetti. The exhibition, curated by Steven Hooper, director of the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (one of the leading international experts on the subject), is promoted by the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation in collaboration with the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the museum with the largest collection of ethnographic art in the world, which will host it as a second venue. For the first time in Italy and Europe, 126 oceanic command sticks are being exhibited together: these are maces, often of great artistic value, with different functions, made in the 18th and 19th centuries, about ten of them belonging to the Ligabue Collection. These are rare pieces from major collections in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, such as the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, the National Museums of World Cultures in the Netherlands, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Rome, and other collections, both private and public, that hold treasures largely never before exhibited: in particular from the British Museum in London, which is lending 26 remarkable pieces exceptionally for the event.

This is the first exhibition entirely devoted to these artifacts: the goal is to shed new light on the oceanic staffs of command. The Newest Continent, as Oceania is now referred to, the last to be discovered by Europeans before Antarctica, is an extremely diverse collection of islands scattered over half the surface of our planet, united by the great Pacific Ocean, which unites them. From Australia and New Guinea in the west, inhabited for 50,000 years, to the Polynesian islands such as Tahiti, Easter Island and Hawaii discovered by Polynesian travelers a thousand years ago, these lands have a rich variety of cultures that fascinated the first Europeans, who reached them beginning in the 16th century. Pacific Islanders had developed original techniques, customs, and art forms that evolved or modified in the ocean territories according to the different contexts and history of each. Command sticks, usually classified as primitive weapons although in many cases never used as such (actually also splendid sculptures made of wood, stone, and whalebone, artifacts with multiple uses and meanings, unique pieces that were expressions of the creativity and skill of extraordinary artisans), were among the most widely used and still produced materials when Old World expeditions began arriving frequently in those lands between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before missionaries and colonial administrations discouraged their production.

The object of curiosity and admiration, study and collecting, they were brought to the West by adventurers, researchers, traders, missionaries and colonial officials. Yet precisely because they had long been considered the gory tools of savages, they were forced into a minor role in museums and exhibitions. The Venetian exhibition aims to present them in all their multiple valences: complex true works of art, representations of deities, status symbols, prized trading objects and accessories for exhibitions, and sometimes instruments of combat.

Accompanied by a Skira catalog, Power & Prestige was also an opportunity for the first systematic study of these materials, which played an important role in Pacific island cultures (in Tonga, Tahiti, New Guinea, Easter Island, and other islands) expressions ofart and deep-rooted customs to be known and respected; objects that aroused the admiration of celebrated twentieth-century artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Constantin Brancusi, but were forgotten or little investigated by the proprietary museums themselves. In fact, often the interest of Europeans was simply folkloric: the sticks were considered exotic souvenirs to be displayed or resold. Other times it was a scientific interest, animated by Enlightenment philosophies and the Linnean system, in order to bring specimens of all kinds to the intellectual circles of Europe such as those of the British Museum or Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh. Joseph Banks, for example, was a great promoter of this dissemination upon his return from Cook’s first voyage; likewise Ashton Lever founded his own museum known as Museum Leverianum, first in Liverpool and then in London, ending up bankrupt for obsessively collecting natural materials and curiosities from around the world. Having sold his phantasmagorical collection, which contained many sticks from Oceania, at auction, scholars are also attempting to reconstruct it through watercolors made in 1783 by the artist Sarah Ston, and it was at the very exhibition Power & Prestige that a stick from New Caledonia now kept at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh was identified and an ituki bat from Fiji kept in Cambridge added to the list: both clubs will be on display at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice on this occasion.

There were also many missionary societies, both Catholic and Protestant, that collected these objects in traveling museums for the purpose of exhibiting successful evangelicals and facilitate fundraising by displaying the artifacts of “heathen” converts, such as the London Missionary Society, whose collection was dispersed beginning in 1890 and flowed in substantial part into the collections of the British Museum, or the Methodist Missionary Society, which invited missionaries to promote the collection and sale of local products for charitable purposes as well. Some objects in the exhibition come from collections of this nature such as the two valuable anthropomorphic sculptures from Easter Island that now belong to the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Rome. The museum world however in the second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of key figures who promoted the acquisition of ethnographic material by developing personal and institutional rivalries such as August Francks at the British in London, Henry Balfour at the Oxford Museum, Baron von Hugel at Cambridge, and, for Italy, the zoologist and anthropologist Enrico Giglioli, whose collections are now the core of the Oceania collections of the museums in Rome and Florence.

“In the Western world and in Europe,” explains Inti Ligabue, president of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation, which is celebrating its first five years of activity this year, “only in recent years has it begun to look with eyes untainted by prejudice and preconceptions at the populations and cultures of distant continents: populations that are often overwhelmed and whose memory and knowledge have been erased, either deliberately or out of arrogance. Artifacts such as ocean clubs are still partly mysterious objects, we do not fully understand their messages nor the symbols that adorn them, but they appear extraordinary in features and the stories they can tell will know how to respectfully lead us across the Ocean, unfurling the sails of knowledge.”

“The Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation,” says Emmanuel Kasarhérou, president of the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, “is a valuable research center for the dissemination of knowledge about collections, cultures and various themes dear to museums like ours. This relationship is a wonderful opportunity for our museum to share its collections and to do so for the first time, in particular, with the Italian public. Museum specialists know this, there is no ideal recipe for a successful exhibition. But there are points of view, insights that allow visitors to get to the heart of the matter and make a new journey, through the works. This is the case with this exhibition.”

For all information you can visit the ACP - Palazzo Franchetti website.

Pictured, from left: Ùu, two-faced staff of command, detail (Marquesas Islands; late 18th - early 19th century; wood, coconut fiber rope; length 142.9 cm; Venice, Ligabue Collection); Ceremonial mace/dancing stick, detail (Papua New Guinea, Buka; late 19th - early 20th century; wood, pigment, length 92 cm; Paris, Musée de quai Branly); Taiaha, fighting stick, detail (Aotearoa, New Zealand; early 19th century; wood, abalon shell, fiber, dog hair, length 193 cm; Venice, Ligabue Collection); Vat, fighting stick, detail (Papua New Guinea, East Sepik Province; late 19th - early 20th century; wood, pigment, length 129 cm; Bienaymé Collection).

Venice, Oceania's first major exhibition of command sticks at Palazzo Franchetti

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