CASE STUDIES

Climat, Capital, and Colonialism:
A Congolese Perspective

Becca Voelcker

Goldsmiths, University of London, and Central Saint Martins

Mots clés: climate, colonialism, capitalism, histoire, DRC, Africa, Belgium, contemporary art,
extractivism, neocolonialism

un accès ouvert

journal

ABSTRAIT

How do global inequities inherited from the past continue to profit some people and devastate
the lives and lands of others? How is the contemporary physical environment suffused with
traces of colonialism and how do its infrastructures accommodate neocolonial practices of
extractive capitalism? What can artists, designers, and architects do to expose injustice and
call for structural change? These are some of the questions the Congolese artist Sammy Baloji
discusses with Dr. Becca Voelcker in a critical conversation about climate resilience and
justice that considers colonial history and our extractive capitalist present.

INTRODUCTION

The Congolese artist Sammy Baloji is not interested in representing colonialism as nostalgia, ou
as a thing of the past. He is interested in exposing the continuation of that system and its effects
on communities and climates today.

Working with photography and installation, Baloji raises important questions about climate
justice. How do global inequities inherited from the past continue to profit some people and
devastate the lives and lands of others? How is the contemporary physical environment suf-
fused with traces of colonialism and how do its infrastructures accommodate neocolonial
practices of extractive capitalism? What can artists, designers, and architects do to expose
injustice and call for structural change?

Baloji was born in 1978 in the city of Lubumbashi, Katanga Province, a region of the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) rich in natural resources. He now divides his time
between Lubumbashi and the capital of the Congo’s former colonial ruler, Brussels, Belgium.
Dans 2008 Baloji founded Lubumbashi Biennale, one of Africa’s most dynamic events for con-
temporary art and culture. Locating the Biennale there, thousands of miles from the nation’s
capital Kinshasa, and even further from European metropolises where exhibitions and fairs
often take place, is an act of cultural decentering and a critique of hegemonic structures.
En effet, the history of European fairs constructing pavilions to exhibit objects and people from
colonized territories is an important topic in Baloji’s recent work, and one of the many themes
discussed below.

Moving between geographies of colonizer and colonized, Europe and Africa, Global North
and South, gives Baloji a keen sense of what he calls being “in-between”—a phrase that
echoes W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of the double consciousness of black subjectivity that lives

Citation: Voelcker, B. (2023). Climat,
Capital, and Colonialism: A Congolese
Perspective. Journal of Climate
Resilience & Justice climatique, 1, 55–65.
https://doi.org/10.1162/crcj_a_00010

EST CE QUE JE:
https://doi.org/10.1162/crcj_a_00010

Auteur correspondant:
Becca Voelcker
beccavoelcker@gmail.com

droits d'auteur: © 2023
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Publié sous Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International
(CC PAR 4.0) Licence.

La presse du MIT

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Climat, Capital, and Colonialism

within a white supremacist society (D. L. Lewis, 2000, p. 38). Although most of Baloji’s work
visualizes places in the DRC, he always has one eye on Belgium and on how to use his dual
location productively. To this end, dans 2017 Baloji and his partner started Twenty Nine Studio &
Production in Brussels, combining an art studio and a production strand for documentary and
experimental film.

Documentary and photography carry significant imperial legacies. Colonizers conducted
so-called objective scientific research to classify colonized peoples as inferior and therefore
exploitable (Campt, 2017; Corbey, 1993; Hight & Sampson, 2013; Wolbert, 2000). Baloji’s
reappropriation of lens-based media specifically addresses this.

Many of Baloji’s projects focus on the architecture and urban planning strategies of imperial
reign. This focus derives from his understanding that spatial structures (designed for colonial-
ism) determine social structures (of continued injustice). In this understanding, Baloji also ech-
oes Du Bois, who argued that the material and discursive origins of European monumentalism,
such as the gleaming boulevards of Brussels, were found in the brutal colonial regimes of the
Congo (D. L. Lewis, 2000, pp. 394–396). Baloji extends Du Bois’s idea by taking the reverse
view to look at European traces that continue to shape life in Lubumbashi today.

Combining archival and contemporary images taken in Katanga Province with objects
including plants and copper that testify to DRC’s resource wealth, and the human rights
violations and pollution that resulted from resource exploitation, Baloji’s installations reveal
connections among colonialism, extractive capitalism, and climate damage. They have been
exhibited across the world, including at documenta 14 (2017) and Tate Modern (2022)—the
latter venue a complicated one, given the source of the Tate family’s wealth in sugar planta-
tions and enslaved labor (Jazeel, 2012).

Legacies, afterlives, and experiences of continued exploitation infuse everyday life in DRC
aujourd'hui, as in so many regions of the world living in the wake of slavery (Hartman, 2021;
Sharpe, 2016). The Congo’s history of slavery under Belgian colonial rule is a particularly
menacing one. Congo was the first country to be created after the Berlin Conference of
1884, in which a group of European powers including Britain, France, and Belgium, carved
up the African continent in an unprecedented land grab of extractive colonial-capital greed.
Belgium’s then ruler, King Leopold II, took over a portion of Central Africa measuring five
times the size of his own country and containing an estimated population of 25 million. Il
called this land Congo Free State. Leopold’s reign over Congo Free State was anything but
free—it was nightmarish. Having promised to help end slavery, Leopold quickly enslaved
the population and forced them to extract rubber from wild vines for the growing global tire
industry. He kept a private army to police enslaved workers. Twenty years into his purchase of
the territory, an estimated half of the population had been killed as a direct result of his rule
(Faloyin, 2022, p. 38). When international condemnation increased, the Belgian government
wrested the territory from their bloodthirsty king. Leopold died without once setting foot in
Africa. DRC gained independence from Belgium in 1960 mais, as Baloji documents extensively,
its colonial legacy continues to shape everyday life because global powers continue to com-
pete over its natural resources.

This global competition plays out spatially in Baloji’s 2016 installation titled 802. C'est
où, as you heard, the elephant danced the malinga. The place where they now grow
flowers, currently on display at Tate Modern (Chiffre 1). The installation focuses on copper
mining, a central industry and source of conflict in DRC. Arranged in a large room to resemble
a museum display, copper objects on plinths quickly reveal themselves as mortar shells con-
taining soil and growing plants. The plants are species native to DRC that are often found in

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Climat, Capital, and Colonialism

Chiffre 1. 802, That is where, as you heard, the elephant danced the malinga. The place where they now grow flowers, 2016. Collection Tate,
Londres. Courtesy of Sammy Baloji and Imane Farès Gallery, Paris.

European botanic collections. The copper and plants both testify to European extraction. Le
title of the installation refers to phrases from a book documenting the involvement of African
soldiers to the First and Second World Wars (Yav, 1990). Through this title, Congolese people
as well as copper and plants are represented as having served global interests and suffered as a
consequence.

The installation also includes photographs Baloji found in an ethnographic museum that
date from the colonial era and show traditional scarification patterns on Congolese people’s
bodies. Scarification is a practice commonly used in many regions of Africa during initiation
rites and for representing a person’s community. The photographs both testify to local tradi-
tions and to the imposed colonial tradition of using photography to Other its objects of study as
“primitive.” Connecting images of bodies represented in such a cold, colonial gaze with cop-
per extracted for colonial profit and arms trading, and plants labeled “exotic” and “foreign
species” in European botanic collections, Baloji intersects human bodies with materials from
the natural environment to emphasize the continuity between social and environmental dam-
age under colonialism.

Despite its colonial references, this installation is not—or not only—about the past. Aujourd'hui,
Congolese copper is integral in the making of electric vehicles, as well as solar, hydro, ther-
mal, and wind energy production infrastructures. Ironically, considering these technologies’
promises of clean energy, they depend on mining processes that are at present far from “clean”
in terms of social and climate justice impacts. Mining in DRC today results in frequent conflict
over international and domestic ownership, corrupt and clandestine mining practices, unsafe
labor conditions, and environmental pollution (Mazalto, 2009).

Tackling past and present inequity in installations such as this, Baloji’s work complicates
ideas of climate resilience and justice. In photographic series such as Baloji’s 2006 collection,

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Mémoire, he collages archival images of colonial rulers over images of modern day landscapes
scarred by ongoing mining and pollution to suggest that what’s resilient in DRC is less a belea-
guered populace than the unjust neocolonial logic that continues to exploit it. Extractive
capitalism is what is able to last, to endure, to adapt flexibly to global demands in rubber for
car tires, par exemple, tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold for mobile phones, or cobalt for electric
vehicles sold to people in the Global North as solutions to the climate crisis. The problem with
Green Capitalism, Baloji’s work suggests, is that it is still capitalism.

By reading Baloji’s work in this way, it becomes clear that capitalism’s resilience is para-
metrically opposed to climate justice because it exploits people and the natural environment.
Words like resilience and sustainability often sound “green” and conceal agendas to sustain a
status quo. It is all well and good celebrating the undoubtedly brave resilience of poor people
surviving the misery of climate catastrophes, but better to ask: what and who caused their mis-
ery in the first place? Baloji’s work prompts such questions, offering an important critical
approach to climate justice. As Neferti X. M.. Tadiar has recently written in her Marxist feminist
approach to climate justice, global capitalism depends for its survival (its “resilience”) on the
survival and resilience of a class of people it deems expendable. These people serve capitalism
as an infrastructure of reproductive labor and are more often than not people of color and
people living in the Global South (Tadiar, 2022). If we celebrate these people’s resilience,
are we not also (if inadvertently) celebrating the resilience of the machine their exploitation
maintains?

The following is an edited conversation originally conducted in English and French over
email as Baloji traveled to Brussels from Lubumbashi where he was working toward the forth-
coming Biennale.

Becca Voelcker: You’re coming from Lubumbashi today—could you tell me what you’ve
been doing there recently?

Sammy Baloji: Over the past 18 months I’ve been working on a collaboration between Twenty
Nine Studio and the Brussels-based architectural firm Traumnovelle, the artist and graphic
designer Ayoh Kré Duchâtelet, and the photographer Chrystel Mukeba. We’re exploring the
colonial legacy of the Congo-Belgian pavilions presented between 1894 et 1958 in Antwerp,
Liège, Ghent, and Brussels.

These pavilions emerged in the wider context of many international fairs and universal
exhibitions, not only in Belgium but also in France and Italy. Human Zoos were included in
some pavilions, presenting colonized people, including those from modern day DRC, comme
primitive and wild to justify Belgium’s colonial project under King Leopold II. We’re using
art and architecture, and archival research, to critically examine Belgium’s contemporary
social fabric and urban landscape considering its legacy of creating these Congo-Belgian
pavilions.

A critical examination of these pavilions is paramount because of the colonial and extrac-
tive capitalist purpose they served. The pavilions operated both as propaganda to advertise to
investors the many exploitable resources available on Congolese territory (wood, ivory, rubber,
minerals) and to mobilize Belgian laborers and civil engineers to commit to work in the
colonies.

To make these Congo-Belgian pavilions attractive, the secretary general of the colonies
hired Belgian architects, designers, and artists to appropriate cultural goods and natural
resources from the Congo for making decorative objects and architectural structures to house
these economic propaganda exhibitions.

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Climat, Capital, and Colonialism

The pavilions interest me because, d'un côté, they display influences of Euro-
pean architectural currents, including Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and the Bauhaus, and on
the other, they reveal the very experimental character of the Belgian colonial project.
The pavilions were speculative models of what Belgian colonial occupation could look
like. For the European architects, designers, and artists involved, the opportunity to create
Congo-Belgian pavilions fostered experimentation and creative research into architectural
style. The lasting traces of these experiments are visible in the European urban landscape,
and yet their contribution to the colonial project and its violence to Congolese cultures is
erased.

BV: You spend much of your time on the other side of this colonial system, in Brussels. Comment
do you view architecture in that city? And what about place names? Like the built environ-
ment, names also seem to evidence colonial relations. Brussels’ African Quarter, Matonge,
Par exemple, is named after an area in Kinshasa. Kinshasa, meanwhile, was once called
Léopoldville in honor of King Leopold II, and Lubumbashi was named Elizabethville, after
a Belgian Queen.

SB: Belgium’s urban landscape is whitened, its multitude of influences and connections with
the Congo purged from sight, except for statues commemorating colonial rulers, or streets
named after colonies. Inversement, Belgian colonies, including the DRC, remain dotted with
colonial cities designed for racial segregation. I explore this in my 2013 installation, Essay
on Urban Planning. (Voir la figure 2.)

BV: If I remember correctly, in that work you denounce methods of urban segregation used
in Lubumbashi’s city plan for eradicating local identities. The piece is organized as a grid of
12 color photographs, and a small historical photograph of two boys standing beside a pile
of dead mosquitoes. I gathered that, during the Belgian colonial period, Congolese
workers had to kill 50 mosquitoes a day in order to receive their rations. Six images in
the grid feature aerial views of Lubumbashi and the “cordon sanitaire” strip of land that
was designed to prevent the spread of malarial mosquitoes between Black and White quar-
ters of town. The other six images depict mosquito specimens at the National Museum of
Lubumbashi.

Let’s talk about that piece more. I’m interested in the work it does as a multi-media instal-
lation. Connecting various media seems analogous to the way your work intersects issues of
capitalism, colonialism, and climate. What this intersectionality does is to expose extractive
violence as a simultaneous violence against people and planet. Your approach is
“eco-intersectional,” we could say, in the way it draws on architecture, mosquitoes, plants,
copper, and other materials to diagram a matrix of human and more-than-human roles
within extractive capitalism (Demos, 2020). You seem to use these more-than-human
objects as witnesses to colonial and climate damage. Can you talk more about this way
of working, and how installation helps you diagram intersecting topics dynamically in
the gallery space?

SB: I am interested in human activity and its material production. I’m idealizing, peut-être,
but I’d like to think that a community or collective comprises conscious individuals who
voluntarily engage in a relationship of exchange, based on reciprocity, respect, and equity.
The community is premised on negotiation between individuals. With this comes power.
The question of who holds power in a negotiation is constantly in flux within a community,
and this ephemeral, fragile state fascinates me. Community is constantly up for renegotia-
tion, through verbal and nonverbal exchanges, and via objects and places that bear the
trace of human activity. Places—the environment, climate, vegetation—influence human

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Climat, Capital, and Colonialism

Chiffre 2. Essay on Urban Planning, 2013. Photo: Alessandra Bello. Courtesy of Sammy Baloji and
Imane Farès Gallery, Paris

activity and negotiations, and are affected by them in turn. Intellectual, spiritual, and eco-
nomic activity thus depends on the surrounding environment, including the climate and
ecosystems.

The disciplinary tradition that separates art history, architecture, and sciences threatens to
segment human activity and its material production, eclipsing important intersections of cul-
ture and climate. Art practice can remedy this by becoming a crossroads for several disciplines
to render, in a fragmentary way, human activity in synergy with its environment.

I’m interested in the way human activities map directly onto scientific climate changes,
such as reductions or increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Par exemple, it’s interesting
that levels of CO2 changed in the 17th century because European settlers in the Americas
massacred so many indigenous communities and planted timber forests on their lands (S. L.
Lewis & Maslin, 2015). Moments such as this one reveal how interwoven human activity is
with climate, and how colonial projects are absolutely part of this story. The many socioeco-
nomic, politique, and technological upheavals we’re experiencing today are evidence of the

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Climat, Capital, and Colonialism

human impact on the environment of the appropriations and decimations of precolonial cul-
tures in service of an extractive economy.

It is from this planetary perspective, and the context of modernity and its colonial methods,
that I consider the exhibition space as a political space. Art installation is a way to summon the
memory of conquered cultural practices (in my case, those of the Congo) confronted with the
colonial and modernist project.

BV: Another major characteristic of your work is its refusal to separate the past from the
présent. You’ve said that you’re not interested in colonialism as nostalgia, but in exposing
its survival in contemporary practices of multinational mining companies, labor exploitation,
and climate damage. Taking the long view in this way, your work chimes with Saidiya
Hartman’s description of the afterlives of slavery that shape contemporary life in the United
États (Hartman, 2021). How do structures of architecture and urban planning derived from
colonialism and slavery shape contemporary life in Lubumbashi? It seems that examining the
built environment offers you a way of reckoning with history and its continuation in the pres-
ent, and that this reckoning is a form of justice. You take the long view to resist the amnesia
that capitalism induces in order to continue its extractive practices.

SB: Lubumbashi was built in 1910, an important year for the DRC because it marked the start
of a network between the Congo’s railways and those of Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe).
This rail infrastructure enabled minerals extracted from landlocked regions to be transported to
the coast and overseas. Autrement dit, Lubumbashi was born at the same time as its mining
riches became fully exportable. Mining was not geared to serve Congolese production and
consommation, but was solely for the benefit of Belgium, and the colonial metropolis.

Le 1930 Town Planning Manifesto in Lubumbashi (then named Elisabethville) bears wit-
ness to the segregation and racial hierarchy between colonial administrators and Black people,
which was integral to Belgium’s mining and export practices. The “cordon sanitaire,” or “neu-
tral zone” that you mentioned, and which I refer to in Essay on Urban Planning, kept colo-
nizers safe from the sources of malaria, and from the supposedly rowdy activities of Black
workers. The manifesto claims to create conditions of hygiene, salubriousness, and security
in accordance with “the hopes and needs” of each racialized community (Lagae et al.,
2013). It’s worth adding that many members of this Black community in Lubumbashi were
displaced workers from neighboring regions in and beyond Katanga province, and those
deported from Rhodesia and Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda-Burundi). The city’s demographic
makeup is evidence of the fact that Lubumbashi was created entirely by colonial maneuvers in
Central Africa, and not an internal, Congolese dynamic.

Despite independence in 1960, DRC remained a place of conflict and international power
struggles. Congolese mineral deposits made it a strategic site of interest during the Cold War,
with the West fighting to keep it from communist hands. It’s in this context that the leader of
DRC’s first independent government, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated in 1961 and Mobutu
Sese Seko took power in a coup. Barely out of a colonial state, alors, the country sunk into a
chaos of rebellions and secessionist demands on both sides, torn by interests more interna-
tional than local. Thirty-two years of dictatorship ensued. Even after the end of the Cold
War, it took more than a decade until democratic elections were held. By then, Mobutu
had liberalized the economic and mining sector so that private and international capital forced
the local economy into a dependency on foreign powers—reinstituting historic relations of
colonial exploitation. In short, what this history demonstrates is that the DRC (its own borders
arbitrarily designed by colonizers) still cannot enjoy autonomy.

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Climat, Capital, and Colonialism

In my work, I look at these relations of continued dependency. I use tangible elements such
as architecture and urban planning, collective memory, ethnography, and anthropology, as a
material basis for this exploration.

BV: I was thinking about the arbitrariness of borders recently as I read Dipo Faloyin’s Africa Is
Not a Country, which narrates the histories of several African nations, including DRC. Faloyin
discusses the troubled border between DRC and Uganda, which was hastily drawn up by
Belgium using the Semliki River as a line. The problem is, the river changes its course fre-
quently, leaving Cameroonian and Congolese people unsure on which national side they stand.
As global warming increases and nearby ice caps melt, the Semliki changes even more—over
the past 60 years the river has moved 100 times. More than confusing, this externally imposed
border causes real conflict. Where the border cuts through Lake Albert, it divides a rich oil
reserve that lies underground (Faloyin, 2022, p. 46). The border is like a signature of Belgium’s
appalling ignorance of climate and geography, not to mention human rights. And this signature
is more than a line on a map because it sparks very real conflict, to this day. Thinking about
historic traces and their very real implications got me thinking about photography as a medium
in your work. Several of your works layer archival and contemporary images as visual haunt-
ings or palimpsests of violence. Is this how you understand them?

SB: En effet, the process of collage and the use of multimedia installation in my artistic practice
comes from a long reflection on the medium of photography and on what constitutes an image.

BV: At the same time as photography invites ideas about the past and memory (we might
think of Roland Barthes’s iconic essay on photography here, Camera Lucida), shooting photos
and film can also be an act of power and representational violence, as Susan Sontag explored
in her essay, On Photography (Barthes, 2010; Sontag, 1979). Humanitarian “aid” and anthro-
pological study are two fields that have long used photography in processes of colonial
Othering (Rangan, 2017). It seems like you’re attempting to reappropriate the medium to
reverse its worst effects. In my eyes, your reappropriation of photography has a potential
to address climate crisis with an emphasis on social justice, in the way it exposes the struc-
tures and traumas of violence and resists a humanitarian impulse to understand, pity, et
distance subjects. Photography as a medium seems to offer you its capacity for being a
moyen, as in a mediator or go-between, that moves between topics that are often deliber-
ately kept separate (économie, ecology, justice).

SB: Photography arrived in Africa at precisely the time that Europeans constructed metropol-
itan cities in the colonized territories. Photography was integral to this expansionist project
because it represented the colonized “native” under the guise of scientific objectivity. Ce
objectivity was soon questioned. The journalist Grace Flandrau visited the Congo in the
1920s and testifies, in her book Then I Saw the Congo, to photography’s manipulation in
the hands of power (Flandrau, 1929). Photography forged deep racial stereotypes, et était
supported by anthropometry, ethnography, and anthropology. These disciplines still wield
power and influence our vision of the world.

Photography, like all forms of image, is a process of codification, and it fascinates me
because it’s a kind of language and therefore expressive, context-dependent—and mutable.

BV: I like your articulation here because it suggests that images also have the capacity to
convey counter-codes that disrupt the norm. I was thinking about this capacity in relation
to the word “resilience.” I have some problems with the way the word resilience is often
used in climate discourse (Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2017; Borie et al., 2019; Chu et al.,
2016; McEvoy & Mitchell, 2019). Aid and international development agencies seem to

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celebrate poor countries’ resilience to crises and downplay the structural inequities that lead
to those crises in the first place, such as mining or waste dumping (Mackinnon & Derickson,
2013). Donc, I often find myself asking, resilience to what and for whose benefit? I take similar
issue with “sustainability”… what are we sustaining and for whom? If we are sustaining busi-
ness as usual, a status quo underpinned by exploitation, then I’d rather not …

SB: I completely agree with your observations that the words resilience and sustainability can
hide an agenda that reinforces inequality between states and peoples. These words are some-
times used to comfort and insulate projects of universality and modernity. We cannot speak of
resilience when there are regular and often suppressed demonstrations and demands for the
right to justice, to health, to territory, to education. These manifestations can be classified as
social or community movements, activism, artistic or cultural movements …

BV: And your art practice seems to exemplify these manifestations of artistic and activist
aims. What I find interesting in it is a feeling of resistance rather than resilience. Your pho-
tographs and installations resist neat readings, and resist parceling off the past and present.
Works such as Essay on Urban Planning seem to embody what the Anishinaabe writer Gerald
Vizenor calls “survivance” (survival and resistance) (Vizenor, 2009). They reveal remnants of
colonialism surviving in present-day Katanga province, and they resist erasing the horror.

Frederick Douglass celebrated the political power of “picture-making” for its ability to
“see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradic-
tion” (Douglass, 2016, pp. 345–361). Douglass recognized the political potential of photog-
raphy very early, though in this instance he was talking about poets and reformers. Son
phrase got me thinking about your work as a similarly reflective and projective process of
“picture-making.” It seems like you see actual landscapes and urban infrastructures in
Lubumbashi and, by exposing their colonial design, invite audiences to imagine more just
forms of spatial and social arrangement—forms that could and should have been.

Lubumbashi Biennale also seems central to your project for justice, gathering continental
and diasporic artists to share their realities in the wake of colonialism and in the throes of
modern global life and climate change. Maybe the Biennale is a form of resilience in a pos-
itive sense, in the way it facilitates conversations that don’t depend on European gatherings
(served by European flights that replicate colonial trade roots) (Rodney, 2012, p. 251).

SB: Oui. By creating the Biennale of Lubumbashi, one of my objectives has been to testify to the
specificity of territories that were “invented” by the colonizer and the conditioning of life that
results from subjugation to the extractive economy. Autrement dit, as the philosopher Valentin
Mudimbe indicates, it is a question of accounting for the impact of the “Colonial Library” and
its agenda for fragmentating and converting previous social organizations (Bates et al., 1993,
pp. 113–139). We need to find autonomous mechanisms for reconciliation and reconstruction.

BV: You live and work in both DRC and Belgium—perhaps gaining what W. E. B. Du Bois
called a double consciousness that informs your work with two perspectives (Du Bois, 1997,
p. 38). Travelling by boat between the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean, Edouard
Glissant spoke of journeying as being a moment when one “consents not to be a single
être,” and to be instead many at the same time (Diawara, 2009). His words got me thinking
about artists and filmmakers like Rosine Mbakam who travel between Belgium and
Cameroon making films in both places, using that transit to think about colonial routes
and their modern counterparts in globalization …

SB: Since I moved to Belgium, I made photos and art projects, but it took me a long time to find
my physical and mental space. I would describe that space, created by the experience of living

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and working between Brussels and Lubumbashi, as offering an in-between perspective in which
both cities and contexts complement each other, but never form a cohesive whole. This in-
between state is useful for me. From this perspective I can trace aspects of Belgium in the Congo,
just as I can detect deeply embedded aspects of the Congo in Belgium’s cities and landscapes.
Six thousand two hundred eighty-two km separate the countries, which lie in different conti-
nents. Sometimes their political and economic entities interact, other times they don’t. Là
are relations and discontinuities. It’s from this context that my artistic work grows.

BV: Perhaps the in-between state you describe should be a state we all occupy, if we are to
acknowledge the global entanglements that shape our past and present, and use what
Glissant calls a “planetary consciousness” to face climate change in just ways (Glissant &
Wing, 1997). In your work you demonstrate what is possible, from one person and one com-
munity, on a wider scale. You use pieces of the past to construct a proposal for less amnesiac
futures. These futures are worlds in which corporate- and government-led extractive indus-
tries such as mining are exposed as continuations of colonial power structures, donc
challenged, and therefore dismantled. If the colonial pavilions featured in your forthcoming
project are an example of speculative models built in the service of colonialism, then your
own installations offer another kind of model—and your model imagines what climate
justice could look like.

Shortly after our conversation, le 2022 Lubumbashi Biennale opened with a collectively
curated exhibition, which explored toxicity and its social and climate effects, under the title
ToxiCité or ToxiCity. Examining connections between contemporary life in the postcolonial
context of Lubumbashi as well as across the urban Global South, and the historical and ongoing
impacts of industrial processes on the dynamics of urban life, the exhibition resonated with Baloji’s
own work in mapping industrial and economic developments’ impacts on culture and climate.
Entre-temps, Brussels is celebrating all things Art Nouveau in 2023 to mark 130 years since the
architect Victor Horta completed Tassel House, a foundational example of Art Nouveau archi-
tecture in the city. Under the working title of Unmade Pavilion, Baloji is collaboratively staging
an exhibition that explores the colonial power relations that underpin the representational and
appropriative practices of Art Nouveau. As Baloji emphasized in this interview, exhibitions that
critically examine what lies beneath the facades of our cities often unveil relations and discon-
tinuities that reinforce inequality. The process of unveiling that lies at the core of Baloji’s prac-
tice holds the promise of opening the way for more just forms of autonomy and collaboration.

REMERCIEMENTS

Docteur. Becca Voelcker is a Lecturer in the Art Department of Goldsmiths, University of London,
and a researcher at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where she works on
the project “Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emer-
gency.” This article was produced as part of that project, and the author wishes to thank her
colleagues for their encouragement and feedback. The project is funded by the British Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC AH/ V003283/1) and the German Research Foundation
(DFG448472648).

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