Opening March 14, 5 pm to 7:30 pm, artist in attendance.
« The Afrotopos is that other place in Africa whose arrival must be hastened, as it realizes its happy potential. […] It is an active utopia whose task is to uncover the vast spaces of possibility in African reality, and to fertilize them. […] [This undertaking] is the primary responsibility of African intellectuals, thinkers and artists. [1]»
How to fully inhabit one’s imagination and its infinite potentialities when one has been deprived of their own history? How to break free from the alienation that has led to “unprecedented psychic devastations[2] » from generation to generation? Operating as a conceptual framework, the reminiscences of artist Moridja Kitenge Banza’s past lives allow him to glimpse the dawn of dignified tomorrows.
Intentionally blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, intimate narrative and hagiography, Kitenge Banza explores the methods of writing a counterfactual history. He thus transports us into a dreamlike universe at the confluence of intertwined temporalities, revisited collective memories. He confronts his past therein, thereby paving the way to break a cycle and fertilize the present.
Within his monumental compositions, the delicate details of rubber tree foliage unfold as an extension of sometimes mutilated bodies. Anthropomorphism then becomes a provocative technique and stratagem employed by the visual artist to provoke our indignation. Do we remain indifferent to violated Congolese childhoods and the atrocities perpetrated by the Leopoldian administration — extensively documented in Belgian photographic archives? Are we indifferent to the abuse of Congolese childhoods and the atrocities perpetrated by the Leopold administration – widely documented in Belgian photographic archives? Are we more concerned about the fate of the latex tree than the human lives exploited by the rubber industry?
Text by Diane Gistal
[1]Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia, Philippe Rey Editions, “Jimsaan”, Dakar, 2016, pp. 13-14.
[2] Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, La Découverte Editions, Paris, 2013, p.11. See also Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, La Découverte, Paris, 2011 [1952].]
