Footnotes

"For Primitive Art and notably for Vodun, there is only one person, and that is Jacques Kerchache"
André Malraux


Kerchache first visited Bénin (then Dahomey) in the 1960s where he met Vodun priests and was initiated into its cults. He started to form what would become an unprecedented collection. This lifetime's passion was exhibited at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in 2011, as Kerchache himself had requested before his death in 2001.

In Kerchache's own words:

"A "fetish" is a sacred object which embodies the spirit or the force of a god, It is not, strictly speaking, a representation or a portrait of the god, but rather an object that is a receptacle of the god's power."

"The practice of Vodun has always been confined to an intellectual elite. Its objects or fetishes can only act once they have been rendered sacred. They are the material signs of divine affirmation and their longevity depends on their use."

"Picasso never knew the art of Vodun and yet there are astonishing affinities between his artwork and the works of these committed artists, works that are provocative on an aesthetic as well as a magical level. The contemporary artists that have come into contact with such art have quite naturally been fascinated by the extraordinary questions they raise. Vodun art contains all of these things at once: a constant connection between the aesthetic and the sacred, the perfect creation of a sort of three-dimensional ideogram taken to its extreme, an art of subversion in which everything signifies, a process that is surprisingly modern and highly inventive, an experimentation in form, as well as a stab at humour on an aesthetic level."

"At the head of the Dahomean pantheon is Mawu, the supreme god, who is surrounded by adjunct gods grouped together in a sometimes hierarchical pantheon. The great nature gods are accompanied by an entire spectrum of deified beings: clan ancestors, monsters, the aborted foetuses of royal families, the gods of conquered tribes that have been incorporated or even purchased, such as the serpent of Ouidah."

"In addition to this collective aspect, Vodun may also be used for individual aggressive or defensive purposes, as a means of neutralizing or protecting oneself from an adversary."

"The vodun are protectors of property: enclosures surrounded by palm branches, objects topped with a small mound of sand, knotted grasses are clear signs that touching any of these objects will anger the vodun who has been called upon to watch over them. They also protect the villages from devastating plagues. During purification ceremonies that are held once a year, devotees take part in huge processions that travel across the land to symbolically drive away potential diseases."

Kerchache, J., Vodun: African Voodoo, Paris, 2011, pp.14,19-20