Joëlle S. Nzeba and Nicolas Pommier in video conversation with Marina Gržinić скачать в хорошем качестве

Joëlle S. Nzeba and Nicolas Pommier in video conversation with Marina Gržinić

Joëlle Sambi Nzeba and Nicolas Pommier at the artist symposium on October 8th, 2020 at Weltmuseum Wien, in video conversation with curator Marina Gržinić about their art installation “C o l o n i a l i t y / C o n v i v i a l i t y ?” (2020, Multi-part installation) Colonization is a predatory enterprise, it is based on a systematic dispossession, a fundamental expropriation of the colonized from their land, history, culture, and mind. When the royal family of Belgium in the person of King Leopold II and then the Belgian State made Congo their private garden, they established a system that would destroy the ways of life, thoughts and stories of the secular Congolese. By imposing Christian and Western values as the only cursor of civilization, the result was that homosexuality and all the practices referring to it became considered deviant and prohibited. Paradoxically, even today, in the name of an Africanity destroyed by colonization and the Catholic Church, and yet to be rebuilt, African homosexuals are still excluded and silenced even in the diaspora. So we ask ourselves the question: if so many Congolese hands have been cut in the name of a so-called civilization, is it possible to sit at the same table to eat? And how can one start a serene or friendly discussion between victims and perpetrators? There was no recognition by Belgium of the massacres in Congo. No reparation, not even a pardon. We brush conflicts like dust under the carpet, hoping they will disappear. We pretend there is agreement by sharing a recipe for chicken with moambe in the name of ‘ntango tozalaka,’ the good old days… the good old days of la Belgique à Papa, paternalistic Belgium. We thought of and built this artistic project from a series of ideas, feelings, which gave rise to keywords agglomerated to each other. We talk about circulation, geography, LGBT struggles, anti-racism, and feminism, but we do not promise any tangible and concrete creation. Joëlle Sambi Nzeba is a poet, writer, and performer. She was born in Belgium, grew up partly in Kinshasa (Congo) and currently lives in Brussels. She is active in a feminist movement. She is an award-winning author of fiction: Le Monde est gueule de chèvre (The world is a goat mouth; novel; 2007), Religion ya kitendi (The fabric’s religion; short-story; 2005), and Je ne sais pas rêver (I can’t dream; short-stories; 2002). Sambi Nzeba questions situations of powerlessness in social matters and raises questions about identity, belonging, and the mainstream, themes she has developed particularly in her slam poetry and with the group Congo Eza! Nicolas Pommier is an anthropologist and videographer by training. He now directs his projects towards sound practice, both documentary and experimental. On one hand, he is interested in speech, in its liberation and its collection, in the reflection process that he shares with the author and artist Joëlle Sambi Nzeba on postcolonial situation and migratory question. On the other hand, it is the appreciation, appropriation, and restitution of sound by humans in their environment that arouses his curiosity. More information on the artist: soundcloud.com/appletree-project More information on the exhibition at Weltmuseum Wien: https://www.weltmuseumwien.at/ausstel... Exhibition catalogue: https://shop.khm.at/shop/detail/?shop... More information on the FWF-PEEK partner project (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien): https://archiveofamnesia.akbild.ac.at/