Matteo Pini This exhibition is comprised of two new commissions and other recent works. What was your experience bringing these works into dialogue with each other?

Sammy Baloji My work is an ongoing research between the political aspect of extractivism and social life. Mineral resources were used in pre-colonial times but industrial extraction began with the colonial system. The way extraction has impacted social lives is quite interesting. Raw materials come out of the Congo but are processed outside of the country and distributed all over the world. The impact is not only within the geopolitical space but also in how it arrives in the world of capital, how it is redistributed, and how those exchanges lack any sort of justice, recognition or traceability. I’ve been exploring that aspect within my work, trying to find a way of creating narratives that go beyond a propagandist aspect, and how to reclaim these narratives so they can be understood from a human perspective. The exhibition in CCA is a part of that research. The curators wanted to touch on two aspects of my work, extractivism and the recent works I’ve been doing around climate change, environmental justice, and this idea of rebalancing the climate. The show includes works commissioned for the exhibition and new works from my studio, where I privilege experimentation. I thought it would be interesting to bring these together.

MP In the exhibition, copper is a bridge between histories – going back to the pre-modern, the modern and towards the future – as well as between countries and disciplines. Like many raw materials, it is an invisible medium, an absent presence. How would you describe its movement and how it is indexed in your work?

SB I’ve been known as a photographer, mainly because of a series that I did back in the 2000s, but I felt stuck in the medium because of its use within a colonial context and the way that it provided a certain image of the other. I found it quite hard to get rid of or shift this gaze myself and I thought of finding other ways of producing images or creating a language or vocabulary. There’s this tendency to divide time between the past, the present and the future, the pre-colonial, the colonial and the post-colonial. In history as in science, these things are presented as separate, but in real life, we cross all these times together. We read the past with today’s values. In my process, I was thinking of what kind of mediums or materials can create a bridge across times. The forest existed before colonial time, mineral resources like copper existed before colonial time. They were not discovered by the Belgians or Portuguese; they were already there. I thought by working with these elements, I could connect both the pre-existence of the colonial system, the colonial system and its impact, and even the contemporary period. Look at the way people like Elon Musk are selling a future with green energy, but still rely on the process of extraction of the same materials. Even to sustain artificial intelligence you have to extract those same raw materials. It’s something that stands beneath propaganda or economic discourses or political ones. Through time you realise that things are not changing at all.

MP Lots of the works feature human figures. There’s a particularly striking image flanking one of the video works Tales of the Copper Cross Garden, which sees children with copper crosses on their chests taken from a Catholic school in the 1930s. Tell me about the relationship between the church and the extractive imperative you’re describing.

SB In the film, I’m quoting text that I extracted from the autobiography books of this Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, who wrote on the colonial library and the hierarchy of knowledge and all these decolonial topics. He was born in the same country and the same area as me in the 1940s. He was basically taken from his family when he was seven years old. During the colonial period, the Church was in charge of education and was working together with the colonial administration and mining companies. The songs that are played within the film come from the church’s choir during the colonial period. The Katanga Crosses they wear are all made of copper; in the pre-colonial times, they were used as a currency in that region. It’s interesting to see how their meaning had shifted and become a symbol of allegiance to Christian values. There was also a fusion of Latin Mass with traditional Congolese instruments and voices, which play in the background. It all became something more hybrid, but directed to a certain ideology. In the 15th century, in order for the Portuguese empire to spread in the Congo, Portuguese sailors had to get approval from the Pope. This also connects with what happened during the Crusades and this is what Mudimbe is quoting in the film, this notion of terra nullis, how to conquer lands which are inhabited by non-believers. You have this whole idea of the church being of sole importance in a way that connects economics, politics and belief.

MP You identify one of the mechanisms of colonialism is making material ascend to the realm of the symbolic. Copper goes from being a currency to an item with mythological qualities. In the same sense, the Congo itself goes from a place where people live to a place from which material is extracted. What impact do these extractive processes have on the people who live there, the workers, the locals? What are their psychological landscapes?

SB What comes with the idea of progress, with technology and modernism, is this idea of universality, how we can come together behind certain values, certain facilities and certain commodities. But this universality is dictated by powerful systems or even individuals. Behind this idea of universality is this desire to shape and standardise behaviours. Today, if you travel around the world, all the hotels have the same services. The internet is the same worldwide. But the presumption of universality separates us, because our realities are so different. I think it’s all about how to be in and create spaces of negotiation, where we can all learn from each other and not have these preconceived ways of acting or posing or enacting that are related to certain commodities or ideologies. In the film, I juxtapose conversations about the Church and their songs with workers. I didn’t want to hear them talking but just observe their movement as it became a kind of choreography. It’s not only the workers who are silently moving within the factory but also the copper that goes from very thick and metallic forms to liquid, and then becomes a thread that conducts electricity. This electricity brings us modernity and technology but is created in a space where there’s no safety. Despite the humanity involved in this work, the environment doesn’t provide this human aspect. We have this objective of providing, but providing for who? For which society? With what ethics and equity? The quotes from the book provide some opportunities to take a bit of distance from what we are seeing. 

MP Mining isn’t the only technology you use to investigate colonial realities: other works incorporate aerial photography or the terrarium. These are all technologies of domination. Are there technologies of resistance?

SB We work with what we have around us and we are shaped by what is surrounding us. I was born in Katanga and I did my masters at the University of Lubumbashi, which is in an industrial area, although the industrial system has been privatised. The first archives that I used came out of the mining industry and scientific research. I was documenting the whole process, but in the form of objective or documentary photography. Slowly I started to introduce my personal trajectory and local testimonies because I realised that from this scientific perspective we tend to forget what is happening or its impact on society. We can only learn what impact we have through human sciences or social sciences. I learned a lot from these disciplines and their ways of approaching buildings and heritage. To this, I introduced the element of memory. Human memory is fragmented, it has this possibility of erasing, this tendency to choose what to keep in mind, what to remember, what to forget. I started to work with collage in this way, superimposing past and present in fragments, like landscapes which become recomposed and so on. This is the reason I choose to work with images because they can be more polysemic, they can be read from different angles. It’s not like writing. The layers I’ve added within my work, these storytelling narratives, are relayed through mnemonic devices that are part of my community: fragmented poems that relate to mythological stories of where my people come from, but also genealogical elements about people that are part of the community, part of the territory. I’ve been inspired by these mnemonic devices and the way that they, in the end, provide knowledge but in a fragmented and multi-layered way. I’ve also been collaborating a lot with historians, art historians and anthropologists. I realised that what was important for me was to be able to grasp the context, to be able to create my own context, which can also be a space of experience. In the Congo, there has always been resistance, from the 15th century to now. There are many, many stories and many aspects of resistance to slavery, to the colonial system and even to dictatorial regimes. But it’s just not known; it’s not spoken or written about. 

MP Your engagement with history is not limited to a broader historical past present and future but to art history itself. Works use the idioms of Belgian Art Nouveau or abstract expressionism, but with a reflexive, critical eye. How did this come about?

SB When I started to look at what other mediums or traces of the pre-colonial period I could use within my work to create this bridge – like copper, raw materials and so on – I also started to collaborate with an art historian who specialised in the history of the evangelisation of Africa in the 15th century. There’s this book, African Art and Artefacts in European Collections: 1400-1800 by the Italian art historian Ezio Bassani which did an amazing job tracking within Europe and the US all the artefacts and art that arrived in Europe from the 15th century to the 18th century. When I got this book I started to see that these artworks and artefacts came before the invention of what we today call art. But by the time of the Renaissance, African objects and other objects from the New World were part of the cabinets of curiosity. These were spaces of knowledge, places from which scientists of that time could learn what can be done both by nature and humans, also how rank works within a society. Those cabinets are the origins of museums. It was just a few years after the arrival of those objects in 1630 that we started to think about creating the fine art academy, which started with this Eurocentric idea of categorising arts, but only the art that is produced within Europe. The Renaissance did not consider artworks that were produced outside of Europe or outside the European canon. It was only when they were shown at the Venice Biennale in 1922 as “Nigger’s art”, or “African art” that they were recognised as artworks. I started to consider how these objects were considered and classified within the collection that they were maintained in. You find most of these objects either within cabinets of curiosity, ethnographic museums, anthropological museums or museums of natural history. When some of these objects were shown as art for the first time, they returned to their collections and were reconsidered in the way the museums wanted to identify them. The whole of art history has been thought through the Western canon: when it comes to talk about African art history it all starts in maybe the late 1930s and 1940s. Of course, in the background, this colonial presence and this sort of acknowledgment happened when artistic movements such as Dada and Cubism and so on started to break with classicism and introduce all these other forms inspired by ethnographic museums and anthropological ones. This is where we start to recognise African art. But out of that, African art can be read only through ethnography and anthropology or history, or these kinds of disciplines that were also invented in the 19th century. They were brought into existence only because of the idea of conquering or classifying others. In other works, I have been looking at the way the CIA and the FBI used abstraction in art to promote a certain liberalism against the socialist realism that international communism promoted. I’m not denying how talented those artists were, and I’m not judging what they’ve done, but it goes to show how art can be used within a certain machine to divide, to create certain hierarchies, to create all these kinds of words that tend to separate societies. I’m working with Art Nouveau abstractions, video, films, documentary, archives, documentations. From this documentation and this research, I can come out with certain aesthetic forms that both question the history, the present, representation and fantasies.

MP Can one work outside of the classifying impetus brought about by Western art in the present day?

SB Within the history of art you have this classification, and from every generation, there has been this idea of being critical of the legacy and providing a new approach. Within contemporary art you have the mixed media approach, research approach, the interdisciplinary approach. Within the art world there’s this possibility of breaking these canons that tend to divide and keep everyone in boxes. We are in a more democratic era in a way that it’s already no longer possible just to think about the Western canon. I don’t think that exists anymore. When you go to the Venice Biennale you have everyone doing everything. You have the Japanese pavilion, you have the Chinese, you have African pavilions, you have all these things that come together. That’s made it possible to exist out of the canon.

MP Your practice looks at history with the idea to retell, reimagine and connect. How can the past be a space of regeneration?

SB We all get our inspiration from the past. Even superhero films go into mythology in order to regenerate themselves. We are still inventing mythologies: colonial propaganda can be considered as a mythology of the conqueror. The nuclear weapon was once considered to be an arm for peace. This is part of human beings. I’m not naive in that way. I don’t think that I’m an activist or that my work is about reconnecting people. It is impossible to change the process. My art comes out of this aim to connect, to learn from each other, to rethink, to create those critical spaces where we are not just getting information. In 1968, there was always this idea of, “Who are you and from which position are you speaking, and to whom are you speaking?” These notions are so important and we tend to lose them in a universal way of thinking. For example, how can you disconnect climate change from colonial activities and extraction, from social justice and environmental justice? It’s not possible. In your real life, you have to deal with personal problems, ecological problems. You need to deal with money. You have all these disciplines crossing you every day and there’s not this possibility of just thinking from a neutral perspective. Human beings are more complex than discipline. .