Photographer, visual artist, and filmmaker Sammy Baloji (1978), from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is participating in this year’s Venice Biennale with his artworks, which will amplify ongoing colonial-postcolonial dialogues and the artistic practice at different levels. With a focus on the cultural, architectural, and industrial legacy of the disputed and resource-rich Katanga region, Sammy Baloji primarily examines the colonial history and the impact of Belgian rule in the Congo, its enduring ecological effects, and its entanglements with the present.
The layers of Sammy Baloji’s creative practice include, for instance, the use of scientific investigation, personal testimony, and archival materials; through this, he depicts diverse problems that go beyond colonialism, environmental impacts, and continued colonial extractivism.
‘Photography arrived in Congo, or even in Africa, through colonial expeditions and photography helped a lot to create this image of ‘the other’ or the savage or the foreigner… I wonder myself, as an African, or as a Congolese, how I am able to produce a new narrative with the same medium?’ This is what Sammy Baloji said about the arrival of photography in Africa.
Art of Sammy Baloji
Two major points come together in the art of Sammy Baloji. One is photography, and the other is the ‘other’ that was created in the colonial period. Photography is not a medium that created the ‘other ’ body, or colonial gaze. It is, as argued by Derrida, “translating” that gaze, attitude, history and object of the ways of seeing into a picture. Sammy Baloji was born and raised in the mineral-rich Katanga province. It is certain that his work reminds one of the film Blood Diamond, or the installation ‘Toxicity‘ presented by a collective from Congo at the 2022-23 Biennale. Many African countries today are (in)famous for their environments being destroyed to meet various Western demands, such as for wood, minerals, and diamonds. Photography, as Derrida said, only does what it does: it translates the various horrors of Western countries, their ways of seeing, and the problematic contemporaneity they have created.
Western countries implemented their exploitation in African countries by building large factories and enforcing underpaid labour conditions. The destruction of African countries, including Congo, is almost complete. As symbols of this, many factory buildings from that time stand upright. In this context, by depicting ‘workers’ and African bodies, Sammy Baloji seeks to convey the experience of colonialism through his many art projects.
In Sammy Baloji‘s project Mémoire [Memory] (2004–06), an ironic return of colonial history can be seen. Through the juxtaposition of archival images of workers with subtly colored panoramas of today’s mining wasteland, historical dogmas on colonisation in Katanga Province are being challenged. Many buildings and factories, constructed by Western countries to exploit the mineral wealth of the then-Congo, still stand like ghosts. These ghosts are the spectres of colonialism. Against their backdrop, workers and others are recreated from archival images to produce new ghost-like creations of the past that advance into the present.
In Sammy Baloji’s project Urban Now: City Life in Congo (2016), the question posed by the tagline ‘urban now’ concerns colonial citizenship created for exploitation and what remained after it. The project was developed and argued around what the artist understood as the continuation of his ethnographic investigation in his city, of what living—and living together—might mean. The city and the ‘new life’ it offered are condensed into billboard advertisements. The project projects the irony that the city is rich in voids. As one goes through the photographs in this project, one becomes aware of what absence is. The mineral wealth that existed was looted by Western countries. The country has neither wealth nor resources. It is also necessary to know; only then can one understand what the colonial project was.
When mineral deposits were abundant and Western powers could extract them, Congo’s development dreams soared as high as the sky. Those dreams were evident on billboards of that time and later as well. However, things changed, and after colonial powers left Congo’s land following exploitation and depletion of resources, it has turned into a ghost town of billboards and expectations. Sammy Baloji has been working on visual archival collections in this project. The project focuses on the modernity that existed during the times of exploitation, the ghosts of modernity in Congo, where resources have disappeared after exploitation, and the humans who live as guardians of it.
Sammy Baloji’s project ‘Johari – Brass Band (2020)’ is the installation of the giant form of the triumphant, considered a symbol of Africa. It is an attempt to symbolically recover Africa’s lost voice, carried out through this project, which also includes colonial connections. Weakened by the uprising and the loss of Haiti, France modified its colonial policy and surrendered Louisiana to the United States in 1903. Local slaves used the musical instruments that the French troops had left behind when they left Louisiana to form brass bands. Sammy Baloji’s two sculptures, which resemble French horns and sousaphones, allude to this historical period.
The main target of the ongoing exploitation since 1885 was copper used to make brass, and the fact that it was used to construct this installation underscores the irony of history. This musical instrument musicalises the history of exploitation and brings it back to the lost musical instrument. The 2019 performance and interactive video project Kasala: The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error explores how Luba history is passed down, especially through oral and aural modes, as well as through memory techniques such as scarification and art objects.
The project ‘A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes (2018)’ mainly uses museological objects and cultural artefacts. The question here is what kind of politics the image (called ‘picture’ in English and ‘picha’ in Swahili, a tangible form of visual representation) creates beyond Western conceptualisation. The theatrical flats on either side of the stage depict “jungle scenery,” a forest imagery Westerners associate with a primitive, uncivilised area. It does, however, organise both the primitive and the civilised.
Politics of art of Sammy Baloji
Fanon says in his text ‘The Fact of blackness’ that ‘I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.’ Fanon is referring to the historical construction in which African bodies are reduced to mere objects among others. He depicts Fanon’s argument poetically and questions the historicity of this objectification by prioritising history (archival) itself. Based on Hegel’s idea of “being for others,” Fanon argues that every ontology (self) becomes unattainable in a colonised and civilised society. That is, Fanon says that the formation of the body at the point at which beingness was lost occurred during the colonial period. We need to examine Sammy Baloji’s artistic journey in light of Fanon’s argument.
Fanon’s classic claim that the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man can be said to introduce the postcolonial African world. The question of where, when, and how the African ‘self’ has been lost has unravelled the politics of exploitation that still continues. There will always be a world—a white world—between you and us, which expresses and embodies all forms of exploitation and its internal structures.
As Edward Said said, the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples, and civilisations. Africa, too, was transformed into a distinct identity and a stage created for exploitation. Colonialism was a long-term practice, and the way it was implemented became a tool of exploitation/oppression that could be used again.
Roland Barthes talks about photography as ‘a kind of subtle beyond.’ That is, it is not just about what is seen or understood from it, but a subtle world beyond that which photography presents. It is in this context that one can say, as Barthes, ‘the presence of the thing (at a certain moment) is never metaphoric.’ The African body depicted during the colonial period and the African body recreated or reorganised in Sammy Baloji’s artistic creation are not the same. The political faces and imprints intertwined within it push forward the indeterminacy of readings, the unlimited possibilities.
However, in Sammy Baloji‘s artworks, a fluidity is proposed. This may justify what Barthes said, ‘Language is, by nature, fictional.’ Whatever is put forward has a character and quality within a fiction. Sammy Baloji’s presence at the Venice Biennale raises some questions. The post-colonial is primarily a place that questions and problematizes colonial cruelties. Such a world, a stage, is created here.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
