El Anatsui’s Dusasa (Silver bottle-cap tapestry)

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

El Anatsui’s Dusasa embodies durée as a tactile philosophy: a fabric woven not of thread, but of time-infused waste. Hundreds of thousands of aluminum bottle caps—once symbols of global consumerism and colonial trade—are flattened, pierced, folded, and stitched together into a flowing metallic sheet. It is not simply an artwork; it is a living memory field—an object whose form is constantly mutable, reflecting Bergson’s core idea: that true reality is continuous becoming, not fixed form.

In Creative Evolution, Bergson describes life as a “vital impetus” (élan vital) surging unpredictably through matter. Anatsui’s tapestry reflects this: the work can be reinstalled differently each time—undulating like a river, cascading like cloth, resisting the rigidity of static sculpture. It is a visual durée—movement crystallized, yet refusing finality. It is matter becoming meaning.

Moreover, Dusasa is also a Bergsonian memory object. Each fragment carries a trace of human consumption—soda, beer, palm wine—linked to networks of postcolonial trade, trauma, and transformation. These traces are not inert data, but virtual energies that press upon the present, just as Bergson argued memory does. The shimmering surface is not just aesthetic; it is psychic—holding stories not explicitly told but unconsciously remembered.

The work enacts a creative synthesis: the colonial wound is not denied but woven into beauty—not in erasure, but in affirmation. And this is profoundly Bergsonian. Creation does not eliminate the past—it releases its virtual potential to become something more. Anatsui does not negate waste; he transforms it through the force of form, through intuition, gesture, and tactile intelligence. Each stitch is an act of metaphysical resistance—a refusal to let the dead remain dead matter.

In Dusasa, Bergson would see a luminous affirmation: not only of African cosmology and global entanglement, but of the pure power of creative becoming—that even what appears discarded may be re-activated, if touched by the inner movement of time and the hand of vision.