Urban Now: City Life in Congo

VISUAL ESSAY URBAN NOW: CITY LIFE IN CONGO

Sammy Baloji (1) and Filip De Boeck (2) (1) Photographer, Belgium, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2) Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, KULeuven, Belgium

In ongoing discussions about the nature of thetical local upper middle class. the African city, architects, urban planners, In sharp contrast to these – often violent- sociologists, anthropologists, demogra- neoliberal re-codings of earlier colonialist phers and others devote much attention modernities, the current infrastructure of to the built form, and more generally to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic the city’s material infrastructure. Architec- Republic of Congo, is of a rather different ture has become a central issue in western kind. The built colonial legacy has often discourses and reflections on how to plan, fallen into disrepair. Its functioning is engineer, sanitize and transform the urban punctuated by constant breakdown, and site and its public spaces. Mirroring that the city is replete with disconnected infra- discourse, architecture has also started to structural fragments, figments, reminders occupy an increasingly important place and echoes of a former modernity that in the attempts to come to terms with the continues to exist in a shattered form, but specificities of the African urbanscape and no longer has the content that originally to imagine new urban paradigms for the went with it. These fragments are em- African city of the future. Very often these bedded in other historical rhythms and new urban futures manifest themselves as temporalities, in entirely different layers ‘cities yet to come’1 in the form of billboards of infrastructure, land ownership rights and advertisements. Through an aesthetic and social networks. Failing material in- display of modernization as spectacle, and frastructures and an economy of scarcity inspired by urban models from Dubai and physically delineate the limits of the pos- other recent urban hot spots from the Glob- sible in the city. At the same time however, al South, these images foster new dreams they also generate other possibilities and and hopes, even though the new city they enable the creation of new social spaces by propose invariably gives rise to new geogra- means of which breakdown and exclusion phies of exclusion, as such a city often takes are bypassed and overcome. the form of gated communities and luxury In a collaborative effort between anthro- satellite towns for an often still rather hypo- pology and photography, a project that has

1 Simone, A., 2004. For the City Yet to Come. Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University Press. resulted in a book and an exhibition2, the answers does urban Congo offer in re- present authors, visual artist Sammy Baloji sponse to the challenge posed by the hole? and anthropologist Filip De Boeck reflect If the city has transformed into a hole, how on these various – different but simulta- can this hole be ‘illuminated’ to become neous – narratives of urban place-making. the something else that enables living, and In this joint work we offer a visual study living together in the city? The notion of liv- of elements that defy verbal narration: the ing together can only exist where the whole, city’s affective landscapes and moods. As the assemblage is not fully formed and is such we consider changes in how cities not yet closed. Living together always im- and territories are imagined by different plies a contestation of how a social body, a kinds of people in the DRC today. collective, completes itself – it is a process Essentially, our ethnographic, photo- that is never completely closed, summed graphic and filmic exploration of the city’s up or fully identical with itself. scape offers an investigation into the quali- As family, kinship and neighbourhood ties of the ‘hole’. One could say that, today, solidarities are often stretched to the lim- the notion of the hole (libulu in Lingala, the it, and residents search, sometimes des- lingua franca in large parts of Congo) fully perately, for a viable experience of being captures the essence of the city’s material together, we have tried to understand what quality. It defines the generic form of Con- new forms are emerging, and how to un- go’s postcolonial urban infrastructure. In- derstand these new forms. What is inves- deed, the surface of the Congolese city is tigated here are the closures and openings pockmarked with potholes, while unstop- through which this living together in the city pable erosion points constantly eat away is made possible or is rendered impossi- at the urban tissue. Similarly, the surface ble. In this sense, our collaborative effort of the Congolese landscape is disfigured can be read as an attempt to discover where by artisanal mining holes and the holes and how people stitch together their lacks of (often unmarked) graves. In fact the and losses and ‘suture’ the folds, gaps and concept of the ‘hole’ has become a kind holes of the city. Sutures here suggest the of meta-concept that people use to reflect possibility of closing wounds, generating upon the material degradation of the city’s realignments and opening up alternatives, colonial modernist infrastructure and to thereby pointing to new kinds of creativi- rework the closures and often dismal qual- ty with (spatial and temporal) beginnings, ity of the social life that has followed the and new forms of interactivity and convivi- material ruination of the colonial city. ality. We investigate these gaps and sutures What our work reflects upon, then, is basi- by means of a number of urban acupunc- cally the question of how this ‘reworking’ tures, in other words, investigations of takes place, and how in terms of the expe- specific sites within (and often beyond) rience of Congolese urban residents, this the city of Kinshasa – particular buildings, postcolonial hole is filled. What possible horticultural sites and fields in the city,

2 De Boeck, F. & S.Baloji, 2016, Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds. London: Autograph ABP. Our exhibition Urban Now. City Life in Congo opened in WIELS in 2016, and subsequently traveled to Open Society (New York, 2016), The Power Plant (2017), and Galeria da India (Lisbon, 2018).

afrika focus — Volume 31, Nr. 2 specific graveyards, mountains, potholes, tion between them become visible. new city extensions, and so on – into which In our combination of two ways of ‘see- we insert our analytical needle, the instru- ing’ that bring together ethnography and ments of pen and photographic lens, in photography, we have attempted to de- order to understand what happens in all of velop a form of ‘photo writing’ to delve these places that form important, though into the realities of everyday urban living sometimes materially barely visible, nodes and the different kinds of – colonial and within the city. These are sites where the postcolonial – histories that it reflects and city switches on and off, where quicken- sometimes transcends in its attempt to ings and thickenings of goods, people are construct more tangible and liveable, in- generated and the various lines of connec- habitable urban lives and futures.

Filip De Boeck is a Belgian anthropologist, writer, filmmaker and curator. He holds a Professorship at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, a research center of the University of Leuven.

Sammy Baloji is a photographer and visual artist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He currently works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. The recipient of many awards, his work has been exhibited in important museums and artistic venues across the world.

New construction on the Avenue de la liberation (ex-24 Novembre), municipality of Lingwala, Kinshasa. Cielux OCPT (Office Congolais de Poste et Télécommunication), a former post office and telegraph relay station colloquially known as ‘The Building’, in the neighbourhood of Sans Fil, municipality of Masina, Kinshasa.