The Vital Force

Moussa Kone began working on this series during the beginning of the Covid19 crisis in Europe around March 2020. “The drawings deal with the society's use of resources”, says Kone. The work talks about the human need for the physical commodities of our planet and uses this image to define the more individual layers, which are of a private and psychological nature. The Vital force is literally a critical red liquid substance, which gets drawn from a well reaching down right into the heart of the earth. It is distributed in industrial buckets by groups of women who have babies bound to their backs. In various settings and sceneries the liquid substance seems to nourish often huge and unearthly beings, who seem to depend on their caretaker’s attention. Groups of men are absent: “In an ideal world, the women are politically in power of the vital force, as they are naturally”, says Kone.

In 2020, Kone was invited for an artist residency in Gmünd, a small medieval, city in the South of Austria known for arts and handicraft. There, he integrated local historical and mythological references into the stage-like drawings. Kone’s figures were, e.g., inspired by fresco paintings from the 14th century at the city’s ossuary from a pre-Christian ancestor’s cult. A rare iconic depiction of a “Madonna del Parto”, a pregnant Virgin Mary, was remodeled into a surreal, birth-giving queen-bee-like figure in one of the sceneries. Monuments were replaced and 1000-year-old trees got their deserved offerings. The cultural landscape of the small Austrian valley echoes in the drawings. Kone invites the viewer to follow in the footsteps of the women “who walk on ancient ground” (Kone) to discover a part of the resources, which usually lie in the dark, buried under our feet.