The Charles Lemaire Expedition Revisited. Sammy Baloji as a “Portraitist of Present Humans” in Congo Far West

 

 

On May 11, 2011 the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Belgium opened the exhibition Congo Far West. The exposition was the result of an artists in residence project of Sammy Baloji & Patrick Mudekereza, who took a fresh look at the museum’s historical, ethnographical and musicological collections. Sammy Baloji mainly worked on photographs, by François Michel, and sketches, drawings and paintings by Léon Dardenne, who were both responsible for creating a visual record of the Charles Lemaire expedition in the Congo Free State (1898-1900). During fieldwork in Katanga (2010), the museum collections, which have tended to present a one-sided Eurocentric view of the colonial world, were confronted with today’s Congolese memory. African ‘historiologies’ or accounts of how people today interpreted the past, partly counterbalanced, corrected but also contradicted the ‘image world’ of colonial archives, collections, maps, paintings and photographs. As a ‘portraitist of present humans’ Baloji created diptychs of François Michel’s and his own new photographs, allowing him to provide a prominent place for Congolese expertise. The relationship between the photographs, which is not immediately apparent, gave rise to the creation of micro- histories that all seem to be interconnected, ultimately focusing attention on macro-historical issues such as power, violence and imperialism.

Sammy Baloji (1978) studied at the University of Lubumbashi and the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. He now works as a photographer and video artist in Brussels and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. His work has been exhibited in the DRC, Mozambique, Morocco, Mali, South Africa, Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, the United States, Canada, Japan, etc. He won the Prince Claus Award (2008) and the Spiegelprijs (2012). djamal29@yahoo.fr

Maarten Couttenier (1974) is a historian and anthropologist at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) and mainly focuses on the history of museums, colonial sciences, social memory and African history. In 2010 he published a book marking the centenary of the present-day museum building in Tervuren. maarten.couttenier@africamuseum.be