Photo-writing
Photo-writing Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck in conversation with Dominique Malaquais “Starting from our own practice, a collaborative ‘photo-writing’ between a visual artist and an anthropologist, this presentation will reflect on the possibilities of combining various artistic and anthropological approaches and inroads into the city (in our own case this means the urban contexts of the Global South, in particular Central Africa). To what extent do ethnography and photography (or film and video) reveal a shared methodological possibility to move beyond the urban surface and to reach into the more intimate folds where urban life is generated?” Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji Born in Katanga, a resource-rich region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sammy Baloji explores the cultural, architectural, and industrial heritage of the region, as well as a questioning of the impact of the Belgian colonization. Colliding reality and representation, his works expose past tensions and present entanglements. Filip De Boeck is a Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), a research center based at the University of Leuven, actively involved in teaching, promoting, coordinating, and supervising research in and on Africa. Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck worked together on the exhibition “ Urban Now: City Life in Congo” that took place at WIELS, Contemporary Art Center Brussels; Open Society Foundations, New York and The Power Plant, Toronto, between 2017 and 2018. Focusing upon the “urban now”, a moment suspended between the broken dreams of a colonial past and the promises of neoliberal futures, the exhibition offered an artistic and ethnographic investigation of what living – and living together – might mean in Congo’s urban worlds. Dominique Malaquais is an art historian and political scientist. Her work centers on intersections between political violence, economic inequity and the elaboration of urban cultures in the age of late capitalism. She has taught extensively in the United (Columbia, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence) and is today a senior researcher at CNRS (Institut des mondes africains). With Kadiatou Diallo, she co-directs SPARCK (Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge), an experimental curatorial platform. Recent and ongoing projects include: reflections on exchanges between Africa and Asia as seen through the visual arts, literature, urbanism and spirituality ( Afrique-Asie: arts, espaces, pratiques , co-edited with Nicole Khouri in 2016); Archive (re)mix: vues d’Afrique (2015, co-edited with Maëline Le Lay and Nadine Siegert), a volume of essays on the trajectories of artists, writers and musicians whose practices explore intersections between art(s) and archive(s); exhibitions ( Dakar 66 , at Musée du quai Branly in 2016; Kinshasa: chroniques urbaines , Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, 2019); Yif menga (2018-2019), a collective research initiative on performance art as political proposition.