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Lucy Peltz: You talk a lot about silent stories, both when we're in discussion and that idea
comes up in the poem. What do you mean? Do you want to say a little bit more about this
idea of silence in the picture. I mean pictures surely are silent and yet, in your poem, you've
given Diallo a voice.
Ben Okri: I think in most paintings the subjects are obvious and are intended to be quite clear
about what is being conveyed. The painters, often in great portraiture, say 'This is what
I want you to think and feel,' but this portrait, whether by accident, whether by design, whether
by the conjunction of so many things that came together, conceals as much as it reveals.
There's a very acute relationship between the image that we see and all the unsaid things
around it; so many people, so many absences, as people keep saying, there are not that
many portraits that just suggest so many living stories behind it.
LP: One of the lines in the poem that really draws me in, I think perhaps because I'm an
historian is: 'I have worn history around my neck like chains'. When I read this, or
when I read this now, it always makes me wonder whether
the voice that you've chosen for Diallo is both a historic voice and a voice of a man
in the twenty-first century; if you like the social life of the object looking back on
its whole...
BO: History
LP: ...trajectory, yes.
BO: Because we interact with it very much now, it has to be a voice that projects across
time and speaks in time as well, I felt. I felt that's one of the things that portraiture
does, that it carries itself constantly across time. I keep referring to it as a kind of...
the most perfect form of time travel.
LP: It's a living presence.
BO: It's a living presence, but it's time that constantly travels. It's a moment in
time that constantly travels and in doing so changes its own time that is contained
within it; and ours. It makes us aware that history is not entirely objective in itself.
Because we have this tradition that history can be fixed, but these make you aware that
you can't, you're dealing with a perpetual ambiguity and subjectivity.
LP: Yes, history is a subjective interpretation.
He's an unusually real subject of a portrait and I have always felt, with my knowledge
of eighteenth century portraiture, that the artist-who was actually at the very beginning
of his career-was actually free to explore Diallo, to be with Diallo and to experience
him in ways that he could never have done with an
elite white male sitter; with a prince, a king, a judge there were conventions. Because
Diallo sat outside of those conventions-although he was a man who was respected and admired-I
think that this is a much more modern portrait of a real man than many historic portraits
that we see.
In all of our conversation with people in Leicester, South Shields, Liverpool and London...
BO: We keep coming back...
LP: ...we've found how differently people respond to this portrait and how it repays
our visit, our gaze... over and over again we find different sensations,
different thoughts going on in the portrait and coming out at us.
BO: I think that's because it's a portrait that receives. There are many portraits that
are intended to impress something upon you, but this is a very receptive
portrait. For me, one of the most important things about
this whole project is actually finally to do with looking. Looking at a life, an image
for a long time without judgment; because I think we judge too quickly and we look to
briefly. I think if we looked deeply, we would find so many things so much harder to do and
so many other useful and wonderful things maybe easier to do. And I think it would be
great to bring back the art of great deep looking again.