Why Objects are Never Innocent ?
I recently came across the image of a particularly beautiful perfume bottle: Guili-Guili, created in 1926 by the French perfume house Vigny and designed by Michel de Brunhoff. The object is elegant, sculptural, almost solemn. Its form clearly evokes African statuary, recalling certain sculpted productions from Central Africa, particularly those associated with Lega peoples. At first glance, the bottle "guili-guili" appears to celebrate African aesthetics. But objects, especially those produced by luxury and cultural industries, always invite us to look beyond formal beauty. 1926 corresponds to the Art Deco period and to a moment when Europe showed a strong interest in what was then referred to as “Negro art” or “primitive art.” This fascination emerge in a colonial context shaped by colonial exhibitions, the collecting of extra-European objects, the circulation of ethnographic photography, and the transformation of living cultures into formal repertoires feeding Western imagination. While researching the history of the Vigny house, I discovered that in 1919 the brand had launched a perfume called Golliwog. The bottle and its visual imagery relied on a grotesque Black caricature: very dark skin, exaggerated eyes, thick lips, and unruly hair. Today, these representations are immediately recognized as racist. At the time, however, they were not only tolerated but appreciated by a European bourgeois public that consumed such objects without questioning them. This coexistence is essential to understand: the same period that aestheticized African forms also produced deeply dehumanizing images of Black people. Fashion houses, perfume industries, illustrated publications, and entertainment industries actively participated in spreading an exoticizing imaginaryWith the launch of La Revue Nègre in 1925, Josephine Baker were turned into icons of so-called “Black exoticism,” her image circulating across fashion, spectacle, and consumer culture. African, Asian, and Indigenous peoples were represented as figures of elsewhere, mirages of exoticism, objects of fascination or spectacle. Caricatures circulated freely in comics, advertising, decorative objects, toys, pastries, and luxury goods. In this context, Africa became both a source of formal inspiration and an object of colonial fantasy. Forms were extracted, stylized, and emptied of their meanings, while Black bodies were reduced to grotesque or decorative figures. This is precisely why objects are never innocent. They are products of their time. They reflect power relations, dominant imaginaries, and racial and cultural hierarchies. Every creation is situated. And sometimes, that memory forces us to confront what aesthetics have tried to conceal.
