Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
The idea of the work E’ville is to appropriate the accounts of two political personalities essential to the history of the Congo after independence in 1960, to reduce it to the illusion of a family history, while confronting them with a colonial heritage in ruins—a curse, I would say. More than half a century ago, Lumumba, the leader of the liberation of the Congo, made a speech as a letter to his wife, albeit addressed to the entire Congolese nation, a speech that, until today, left us with an attitude of eternal waiting with this cursed sentence: "The future of Congo is beautiful." The cross between the two narratives, by bringing the dictator Mobuto to the work, is a way of confronting both different narratives that revolves Congo’s political structure.
I have lived in Kinshasa for almost 23 years and for the first time, in 2017, I visited Lubumbashi on the fringes of the Lubumbashi Biennale, where I participated in the artist residency at the Picha Art Center, founded by Sammy Baloji, a Congolese artist. Thus, the history of GECAMINES, my work presented at the 21st Biennale, goes back to the Mining Union of Upper Katanga, created by King Leopold II in 1906. During my visit to the sports circle of GECAMINES—at least what is left of it—I found myself in a space both desert and full of life: these spaces, each in its own way, gave me the impression that the activities were not suspended, but rather waiting for a restart. Far from being a contemplative narrative of ruin, nor a moral lesson, this film is a personal reflection on the history of a place of memory. It is also the deconstruction history of a great country overtaken by its past and exhilarated by the uncertainty of its future. An inner journey on the received ideas, as well as on this brutal reality, sometimes elusive, which tears away tears and dries our saliva. As the history of Congo is falsified, men are falsified, our identities are falsified, this story is a falsification, because our reality does not exist.
As Brazil is a country that also dealt with slavery and colonization, I think that the feeling my work implies reflects the absurdity of transposing an internal conflict, what should be kept between part of the collective memory and forgetting.