by natalie samulka

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a glaring exposé of colonialism in Africa, is framed by scenes in turn-of-the-century London, floating down the Thames. Written for a European audience, Heart of Darkness features a host of european characters, including the narrator, who begin to realize their inherent complicity in the horrors of colonialism, even 6,000 miles away. Its setting on the Thames River, and the repeated juxtaposition with the Congo River, is an integral part of the narrative. 

To connect Bosch’s frozen lake to the Thames River, I superimposed a 1920 photograph of the London Tower Bridge, taken by Ray Weiss, onto the original stone bridge. By implementing this icon, I hoped to immediately transport the viewer to the setting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The photograph itself is significant in this; between Heart of Darkness’s publication and the taking of this photo, there were no significant renovations to the Tower Bridge, meaning we are seeing the same bridge as the characters in the narrative. Continuing with the themes of Heart of Darkness, I interposed Le Kigoma sur le fleuve Congo, ca. 1929, a postcard of a boat on the Congo River. The boat is full of people, waving to the shoreline and crowding to the front decks. By altering the color of the boat to be red, I connected the passengers to the blood spilt and lives ruined along the shores of the Congo, as described in Heart of Darkness. The postcard, marketed and sold a mere thirty years after Heart of Darkness, and written in the language of colonizers, represents group complicity.

In the slideshow, Timothy Morton writes that, “...ecology is not defined by the aggregation of objects or their relationships but by the lively ecological dance in which they participate.” Applying this logic to Heart of Darkness, and the artificially constructed system of colonialism, we see that colonial power is not merely a figure such as Mr. Kurtz but how he and the boat passengers create a narrative. Are the figures sinners, condemned to the frozen lake of hell? Or is the narrative itself, the whole river, to blame? 

The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted from 1503-1515. In the context of European history, this time period was considered the ‘Age of Exploration’, essentially the beginning of colonialism. Though it is several centuries older than Heart of Darkness, it is centered in a similar political atmosphere and deals with the same moral conundrums.  

The other main influence in the creation of this collage is the story of Genesis, specifically in relation to temptation and knowledge. The story goes that, when Eve was tempted into eating from the Tree of Knowledge, humans were condemned to a life of sin. In the painting An Evil Tree or the Natural Heart, which I superimposed onto the sail above the bridge, sins are written on fruit stemming from a base of unfaithfulness. The integration of language with the concept of sin and unfaithfulness felt like a fitting banner to be strung above hell, especially with the context of my other collages and the course as a whole. Continuing with this theme, I added a portrait of St. Francesca Romana, from approximately 1650, above the Tower Bridge. In this portrait, St. Francesca Romana is holding open a book to a young angel positioned in front of a grave. Placing these paintings alongside the Tower Bridge links the corruption of knowledge with the themes of colonial oppression referenced above, and generally ties together the themes of the collage.