A well-sized survey distils the Congolese artist’s research-heavy practice, which draws connections between colonial and contemporary exploration

Born in the mineral rich province of Katanga in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and currently based in Lubumbashi and Brussels, Sammy Baloji finds that the violent legacies of Belgian colonialism in the past continue to haunt the present in the form of multinational corporate extractivism and exploitation.

Congolese photographer and artist Sammy Baloji presents ways of looking beyond photography in a major solo exhibition at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art.

In seinem Werk setzt sich Sammy Baloji mit dem Erbe des Kolonialismus in der Demokratischen Republik Kongo auseinander. Seine beklemmenden Filmcollagen und vielschichtigen Installationen basieren auf Recherchematerial, das der in Belgien lebende Künstler in zahlreichen Archiven Afrikas und Europas aufgespürt hat.

In the two hours I spend at Sammy Baloji’s studio in Brussels, the table we are sitting at accumulates a small library of books and a Wunderkammer of objects. Every ten minutes, Baloji rises from his chair to search for another visual aid to support the point he is making: from 1970s monographs on the art of the Congo Delta to maps made for mining companies operating in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. At one point, he returns carrying a metal vessel the size of a beer can, the surface of which is covered in a floral relief.

Die (Kunst)Welt ist zerrissen. Polaritäten, Ausschlüsse, Anfeindungen – all das scheint die Reaktion auf eine globale Krise zu sein, der nicht mit Empathie begegnet werden kann – denn dies würde ein Gegenüber erfordern. Wenn aber dieses Gegenüber (es sind Viele) als Bilder von brutaler Unterdrückung, Militärgewalt und Terror in sozialen Netzwerken existiert; Oder aufgrund von geopolitischer Lage und vermeintlicher religiöser Zugehörigkeit entmenschlicht und delegitimiert wird – dann wird die Mannigfaltigkeit von Empathie unmöglich gemacht. Es entstehen feindselige Lager, die sich gegenseitig reproduzieren.

Wie sehen Sie die Welt? Was waren die Wendepunkte in Ihrem Leben? Was sind Ihre Träume, Ambitionen und Vorhaben? Kalt erwischt, mag man sich denken, und in der Tat, einfach macht „Unextractable: Sammy Baloji invites“ es den Besuchern der Mainzer Kunsthalle nicht. Die Ausstellung geht uns alle an, sollen uns derlei Fragen sagen. Was selbstredend richtig ist. Man darf sich also durchaus eingeladen fühlen zu dem postkolonialen Diskurs, um den sich hier alles dreht. Lässt man sich auf ihn ein, auf die „Fragen zur Vorbereitung eines Kasala“, die Jean Kabuta dem Betrachter auf dem Weg durch die Kunsthalle mitgibt, ist man auch schon mittendrin. Genau darauf kommt es hier an.

In his artistic work Sammy Baloji investigates the history of mining in his home city of Lubumbashi, located in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He contrasts the profound destruction of the environment and social structures to the memories and hopes of people in the Katanga region. Key elements of his artistic practice are to encourage collaboration between art producers, activists, and academics as well as bringing together many different kinds of knowledge and production. His invitation to 12 artists in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Europe with whom he regularly interacts is a continuation of this development of collective structures that he views as a strategy of resistance to extractivism, an economic model in which raw materials are “extracted” from nature.

L’artiste congolais Sammy Baloji n’a pas son pareil pour connecter des histoires sans lien apparent, et il le prouve de nouveau à la galerie Imane Farès, à Paris. A l’entrée, un terrarium renfermant des végétaux du Congo renvoie aux serres portatives qui convoyaient, au XIXe siècle, les plantes indigènes jusqu’aux pays européens. Sa forme alambiquée s’inspire des minerais dont regorge le sous-sol congolais, notamment le cuivre, utilisé dans la fabrication des bombes lors de la première guerre mondiale. Conflit auquel a participé Albert Kudjabo, dont la voix résonne à quelques mètres de là. Ce Congolais fut réquisitionné par l’armée belge avant d’être capturé par les Allemands, qui en firent un objet d’étude. Ainsi se tisse une trame subtile entre la domestication de la nature, au mépris de la biodiversité, la prédation minière et l’asservissement des êtres.

Sammy Baloji beschäftigt sich mit der Erinnerung und der Geschichte der Demokratischen Republik Kongo und deren Verflechtungen mit Belgien. Baloji untersucht das kulturelle, architektonische und industrielle Erbe der Region Katanga und hinterfragt die Auswirkungen der belgischen Kolonialisierung. Seine Kunst ist jetzt zusammen mit Werken zwölf anderer Künstler*innen in Mainz zu sehen.

In his artistic work Sammy Baloji investigates the history of mining in his home city of Lubumbashi, located in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He contrasts the profound destruction of the environment and social structures to the memories and hopes of people in the Katanga region. Key elements of his artistic practice are to encourage collaboration between art producers, activists, and academics as well as bringing together many different kinds of knowledge and production. His invitation to 12 artists in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Europe with whom he regularly interacts is a continuation of this development of collective structures that he views as a strategy of resistance to extractivism, an economic model in which raw materials are “extracted” from nature.

In his artistic work Sammy Baloji repeatedly addresses the history of mining in and around his native city of Lubumbashi in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He documents how the extractive industries have wreaked extensive destruction on the Katanga region and its social structures, transforming the land into resources and reducing entire societies to a mere pool of potential labourers. He juxtaposes to this harshness the memories, hopes and projects of people who live amidst the ruins of colonialism, industrial mining, and the global capitalist economy.

At the heart of Sammy Baloji’s exhibition “K(C)ongo Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues. Subversive Classifications” were four exquisitely carved ivory oliphants, or hunting horns, from the Kingdom of Kongo. Two of these carvings belonged to Florentine banker and arts patron Cosimo I de’ Medici. Among this show’s many facets was a set of variations on the interlocking geometric patterns that adorned prized possessions such as oliphants, which the newly baptized rulers of Kongo gave to their European counterparts and the papacy as part of diplomatic exchanges. Similar designs were featured on cushions and carpets woven out of raffia palm fibers, so fine as to recall the texture of velvet, which testify to stylistic cross-influences between West Africa and Europe during the Renaissance and beyond. Based between Brussels and his native Democratic Republic of Congo, Baloji appropriated these motifs in a weaving presented on a wooden loom, Goods Trades Roots, 2020, as well as in the series of copper and bronze “Negatives of Luxury Cloths,” 2017–, and The Crossing, 2022, a nearly three-hundred-foot-long crimson carpet that elegantly linked the six communicating gallery spaces of the Andito degli Angiolini, the Medicean residence of the Palazzo Pitti.

The fact that none of this context is mentioned in the Hôtel de la Marine’s audio guide (or anywhere in the room itself) is jarring to say the least, especially given the building’s history and current status as a site of public education, maritime research, and remembrance. No guidebooks or articles about the Hôtel de la Marine seem to mention it either, noting only that these hangings (which did not actually reside in this room during the eighteenth century) were added because they fit the dimensions of the space. This absence contrasts sharply with Sammy Baloji’s one-room show across the Seine, where versions of the same two tapestries were displayed alongside other examples from the “New Indies” and the artist’s own work, and where the themes of slavery, colonialism, and Congolese heritage were emphasized. Known for his archivally driven installations that explore history and memory in Congo, under Belgian rule from 1908 to 1960, Baloji has said that he is “not interested in colonialism as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system.” That interest was on full view in his exhibition, which fused time periods, cultures, media, and materials to explore the unacknowledged debt that history and modernity owe to African sources and bodies.

In an essay she wrote to accompany the Beaux-Arts show, Anne Lafont notes how Baloji “interweave[s] time, media, and artworks” so that we might “see and rethink our relationship to art objects and to history.” On some level, this aim resonates with the Hôtel de la Marine’s mission to bring visitors “on an all-round trip through time,” to “breathe life into the various areas” of the building, and to “expand [a visitor’s] knowledge of history.” And yet the Marine has opted for a particular and partial view of history, one that trades on a myth of the manifold glories and pleasures of the ancien régime without acknowledging the forced labor and suffering that enabled its “worldly” elite society to “flourish.” Perhaps the choice to create a “mini-Versailles” in Paris was driven by revenue concerns, but it would seem to underestimate (if not outright offend) visitors to assume that they could not hear multiple sides of the story, or could not break their “immersive” reverie to learn more about the objects and subjects depicted and their role in shaping the history to which the museum is dedicated.

Whether for its rubber, its copper, its uranium, its coltan, or its lithium, the Congo has seen and continues to see its earth continuously looted by European colonial powers. For the last 16 years, Sammy Baloji has been dedicating his artistic practice to the literal and historic stratas his research has led him to excavate. Caroline Honorien and Léopold Lambert talked with him about what decolonization would signify in this context.

Dans son exposition «Kasala : the Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error», à la Galerie Imane Farès, à Paris, Baloji travaille par associations et juxtapositions d’images. Sur des miroirs, il appose des photos de Himmelheber et des rendus de scanner à rayons X d’objets de sa collection, technique fréquemment utilisée par les musées pour visualiser leur structure et d’éventuels contenus cachés. Le procédé leur donne l’air d’être des pierres d’autant plus précieuses qu’elles pulsent d’une lumière intérieure rose, rappelant ces autres minerais convoités issus des mines du sud du Congo.

A Lubumbashi, où Sammy Baloji est né en 1978 dans une famille de commerçants, la vie tournait déjà autour de l’extraction du cuivre. Le jeune homme se souvient de la cheminée fumante de la Gécamines, la société administrant les mines depuis l’époque coloniale, et des sirènes qui scandaient le quotidien laborieux de la ville. Il n’a pas oublié non plus les violences du début des années 1990, quand le président autocrate du Zaïre, Mobutu Sese Seko, sent son pouvoir vaciller. Lors du massacre des étudiants sur le campus de l’université de Lubumbashi, Sammy Baloji a 12 ans. Emeutes, pillages et xénophobie : la crise rattrape les Luba du Kasaï, l’ethnie dont est issue la famille Baloji, qui perd alors tous ses biens. « Tout ce que je fais aujourd’hui trouve ses racines dans cette expérience violente de devoir renier l’ethnie d’où je viens », rapporte-t-il avec pudeur.

La presenza di Sammy Baloji (Lubumbashi, 1978) a Roma per una residenza all’Accademia di Francia ‒ Villa Medici è stata l’occasione per conoscere e intervistare uno dei più interessanti artisti che lavorano fra Africa e Europa. Sammy Baloji è nato a Lubumbashi, Repubblica Democratica del Congo, dove ha studiato letteratura e studi umanistici. Dopo la laurea ha cominciato a lavorare sulle arti visive come disegnatore di comics, poi ha focalizzato la propria ricerca su fotografia e videoarte. I temi ricorrenti nel suo lavoro sono la storia del colonialismo, lo sfruttamento etnografico, l’urbanistica e l’architettura. Attraversa i linguaggi nell’arco di una ricerca continua e ha partecipato a due Biennali di Venezia, alla Biennale di Dakar e a molte altre mostre in Europa (l’ultima in ordine di tempo: Congo as Fiction al Museo Rietberg di Zurigo), Africa e Stati Uniti.

« En commençant à travailler sur les images, j’ai été frappé par l’effacement de l’histoire. […] Mon travail consiste justement à reprendre le processus d’effacement et à rétablir des connexions défaites. Il se situe aussi bien dans la dissection des couches d’oubli, dans un intérêt pour la méthodologie de la disparition, que dans le rétablissement de liens »