Filip De Boeck

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.

This film follows one group of grave-diggers in the cemetery of Kintambo, where mourning rituals and funerals have become moments of upheaval and contest of social and political orders.

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.