Vesna Faassen & Lukas Verdijk

2017 ‘Out of Africa’

It goes without saying that any bid to put a part of the traumatic history of modern Africa into representation by explicitly soliciting its own agency is fraught with peril and provocation. As acknowledged, somewhat at least, by the producers of this project, such an effort is built on flimsy stilts supported by a cloud of ignorance: the ignorance that arises from lack of research and study in and of the Congo; ignorance of the language in which histories of the Congo might be written, including French; ignorance about the receptive scene of such histories in “sophisticated,” post-Colonial, academic milieu in Belgium or the Netherlands—and of the debates they might occasion; and ignorance of the university press-type publishing and distribution and their attendant apparatuses—conferences, symposia, reviews.

The point here, however, is that Wanneer we spreken over kolonisatie, / Quand on parle de la colonization, is explicitly ventured within an economy of absences predicated on the agonizing deficit of so much that has already gone without saying: the fraudulent premises and misleading structures that underwrote King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonialist adventurism in the 1860s and 70s; the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Force Publique in Leopold’s Congo Free State in the later 19th and early 20th centuries; the underdevelopment and overexploitation visited upon the region for the last hundred and fifty years; the crisis of independence abetted by the extrajudicial murder of the new nation’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in January 1961, just a few months after his accession; and the shadow of all this that falls in the present as the Congo remains one of the poorest and most vulnerable nations on earth, its abundant natural resources notwithstanding.

It was Lumumba who noted in a letter to his wife in 1960 that when “history will one day have its say it will not be the history taught in the United Sates, Washington, Paris or Brussels… but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and both north and south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity.” [1] The question before us is whether the tragedy, misrepresentation and ignorance through which the recent history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been filtered, can be mitigated, even if fractionally, by delivering back to a Belgian public, more specifically to its Dutch-speaking community, some part of that stirring narrative created from within to which Lumumba pointed in hope and expectation.

Flying in the face of omnivorous ignorance, Vesna Faassen and Lukas Verdijk have offered a reflex reaction—with drawn-out consequences—to the unsettling contention in a 2011 article (“Congo in onze navel” [“Congo in our navel”]) by Idesbald Goddeeris that there are no books written by Congolese historians, educated and living in Congo, that have been translated and published in Flanders in the Dutch language. They took it upon themselves to supply this lack, using a network of contacts to solicit essays and texts from scholars and writers in Congo.

Faassen and Verdijk have opted for an uncompromisingly pragmatic approach, caught somewhere, as they observe in their preface, “between risk and trust,” that is strategically different from the more subtle, mediated, even refractive, methods that have characterized other recent artworld negotiations with Congo, including T.J. Demos’ extended dialogue with what he terms the “specters of colonialism in contemporary art.” [2] Perhaps it takes a certain kind of naivety to resurrect a measure of palpability for the demonized haunting that interrogates the rhetoric of justification for colonial crimes explored, for example, in Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011) or the ironic remedialism and almost desperate self-referentiality of Renzo Martens’s Episode III (Enjoy Poverty) (2009), shot in Congo. Instead, we confront here a self-consciously flawed but somehow inevitable form of direct action. Read and see.

 

John Welchman

 

[1] Patrice Lumumba, letter to Pauline Lumumba, in Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrick Lumumba, 1958-1961, ed. Jean Van Lierde, trans. Helen R. Lane (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 422-43.
[2] See, T.J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013).