Sammy Baloji

Photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji’s fascinating film essay explores the Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial history and its ecological significance. Drawing on research from the 1930s, the film highlights the Congo Basin’s vital role in consuming carbon dioxide and shaping global environmental balance over a century.

Rumba Rules, New Genealogies offers an enjoyable, rough-edged glimpse into the music scene of Kinshasa, with impromptu shots drawing the viewer into jam sessions on plastic chairs, and the quest for perfection at the studio.

One of the early landmarks of Belgian colonial urban architecture was the Forescom tower. Built in 1946, it was Leopoldville’s first skyscraper, and one of the first high rise buildings of Central Africa. Pointing towards the sky, it also pointed to the future. It embodied and made tangible new ideas of possible futures, and as such the tower materially translated and emblematically visualised colonialist ideologies of progress and modernity. The video The Tower: A Concrete Utopia offers a guided tour by ‘Docteur’, the owner of this remarkable tower situated in the municipality of Limete. Conceived and realized by ‘Docteur’ without the help of professional architects, the construction of this as-yet unfinished tower was started in 2003.

Sammy Baloji mixes colonial-era promotional reels about farming and mining in his native Congo with contemporary footage of similar practices.

Tales of the Copper Cross Garden: Episode 1 documents the process by which copper is drawn into wire from glowing, semi-liquid ingots. A choral mass provides the soundtrack, while sporadic all-caps intertitles weave biographical details (Baloji grew up in the mining region of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo) with a reflection on the role of the Church in the colonial enterprise in Africa.

The town of Fungurume is situated in the province of Katanga (D.R. Congo) and the hills and mountains surrounding Fungurume form one of the world’s largest copper and cobalt deposits. In pre-colonial times the area was already a major centre in the copper trading network that ran across Central Africa. Today the mountains have become the property of the American Tenke Fungurume Mining consortium (TFM). From 2009 onward, TFM’s mining activities have been in full swing, causing the resettlement of thousands of local Sanga inhabitants. Pungulume focuses on Sanga chief Mpala and his court elders while they are rendering the oral history of the Sanga people, against the backdrop of the industrial destruction of the landscape that anchors Sanga memory and identity.