Sammy Baloji

The exhibition Toxic Lands, Living Narratives builds on research initiated during recent editions of the Lubumbashi Biennale, organized by the Picha [1] association in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Conceived in collaboration with artist Sammy Baloji, it brings together artists whose works question colonial legacies and their lasting impacts on bodies, territories, and imaginaries.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the library and archives of Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, recently returned to the University of Lubumbashi. In his writings, Mudimbe analyzes how Africa was “invented” through the lenses of domination. However, he calls for a process of reclamation: rereading, shifting, rewriting, and subverting imposed forms to invent alternative ways of thinking. To reclaim is to reactivate the archive, open up new possibilities, and oppose dominant history with a plurality of situated, living, and insurgent narratives.

In this spirit, the artists gathered here draw on colonial archives, mining memory, and performative gestures to compose new narratives. The notion of toxicity runs through the exhibition, understood both as material pollution and as a social poison inherited from colonialism. Displaced and circulating, toxicity becomes a lens through which to read the destructive yet potentially transformative effects of extractive logics on cities in the Global South, particularly in Katanga, the heart of Congo’s colonial history. The exhibition examines multiple forms of contamination, as well as the possibilities for reconfiguration they open in a postcolonial context.

Moving between memory and creation, the exhibition becomes a space for confrontation as much as projection. It invites a rethinking of history, a reopening of archives, and a reconnection with narratives to imagine new possible trajectories.