Dan David Foundation · 2024 · Prize ceremony & social media

On Cécile Fromont, and the object that made the enslaved believe they could not be killed.

A two-and-a-half-minute tribute on an art historian whose scholarship has recovered a lost material theology, the bolsas de mandinga worn against the body across the Portuguese Atlantic, and reintroduced the strength it carried to the room where its story is being told.

Client: Dan David Foundation
Subject: Prof. Cécile Fromont, Harvard University; Faculty Director, Cooper Gallery
Direction: Daniella Koffler
Animation: Moofa Animation Team
Year: 2024
Kind: Ceremony film

The subject

Cécile Fromont is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, and the first Faculty Director of the Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center. Her question, across two decades of scholarship, has been how material culture makes religion visible, and how it survives an archive built to destroy it.

Her book The Art of Conversion (UNC Press, 2014) argued that the Christianity practiced in Kongo from the sixteenth century was not a copy of European Christianity but a tradition Kongolese makers built, in their own materials and forms. The Dan David Prize honored Fromont as an art historian of early modern Africa, Europe, and Latin America, "with a special emphasis on the aesthetic connections between Europe and Africa, as created and sustained by the Atlantic slave trade."

The aim

Fromont's argument is that physical objects give rise to the stories told about them centuries later, and that a story about religion is inseparable from the object at its centre. When we came to make the film, we discovered that we did not know what one of those objects looked like. The bolsa de mandinga was almost entirely unfamiliar to us. It is almost entirely unfamiliar to most viewers. We had to ask the Foundation to ask Fromont directly for visual reference.

The film's task became the small, careful one of showing what the bolsa was. Then of showing what people believed it could do, make its wearer invulnerable to bullets, blades, and detection, and in the same visual gesture, showing what those beliefs made possible: rebellions, escapes, the ordinary miracle of a person surviving what statistically ought to have killed them. Belief-objects have material weight. The film's obligation was to give the viewer the felt sense of holding one, and of understanding why it mattered enough to hide inside the binding of one's own trial papers rather than lose.

So little is known about what a bolsa looked like that the design began with what Fromont brought from her own research: the paintings and written testimonies in which the bolsas do appear.

Colonial illustration of a bolsa de mandinga worn against the body on a cord — **Bolsa de mandinga, early 18th century.** Cloth pouch containing inscribed prayer-papers, herbs, sacramental fragments, stones, and coins. Colonial-era illustration showing how the object was worn against the body. Documented in Portuguese Inquisition trial evidence, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. Worn by enslaved Africans and creoles across Angola, Brazil, Madeira, and Portugal from the late 17th to the early 19th century, the bolsa was believed to make its wearer invulnerable to bullets, blades, and detection.

Film still: a young Black man holds a luminous bolsa in his palm — **The bolsa in the hand.** No widely-known image of the object exists — the film had to invent it visually. It is shown as a person would have held it: small enough to fit in a palm, ordinary and luminous at once.

Three pages of protective cosmograms from the Pereira Inquisition trial documents — **Trial documents of José Francisco Pereira, Lisbon Inquisition, 1730.** Pereira, born in West Africa, enslaved in Brazil and then Portugal, made bolsas combining Catholic prayer-papers, esoteric formulae, and Vodun-derived spirit-work. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. Fromont uses the Inquisition's own paper trail, the instrument built to destroy these objects, to reconstruct an Afro-Atlantic material theology it tried to erase.

Film still: a young Black man with arms outstretched, believed invulnerable — **Bullets could not hurt him.** Tacky, the 1760s Jamaican slave-revolt leader whose followers believed his bolsa made him invulnerable. The film argues, in one gesture, that a belief-object changes what a body will risk.

The Dan David films

Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.

On Cécile Fromont, and the object that made the enslaved believe they could not be killed.

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