Visual artist and photographer Sammy Baloji was born in 1978 in Southern Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga province. Starting his career in the regional capital, Lubumbashi, he has built a substantial body of work that explores the memory and history of the region and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A graduate of the University of Lubumbashi and the Haute Ecole des Arts, he is pursuing a PhD at Saint Lucas Antwerpen alongside his schedule of exhibitions in contemporary art galleries, Biennales, and other exhibitions across the world. 

Baloji’s exhibitions share a common thread: a visually sophisticated in-depth exploration of the Katanga region’s cultural, architectural, and industrial heritage, Baloji’s carefully researched multimedia pieces relentlessly examine the stubborn resonance of (Belgian) colonialism in contemporary DRC. Exploring how identity is shaped, perverted, and reinvented, Baloji has built an art practice that spans photography, installations, film, soundscapes, and Art Nouveau architectural models. In this pursuit, he has amassed an impressive record of contemporary testimonies, collections of scientific publications, historical records, and other materials excavated from colonial archives that are as strong a presence in his exhibitions as are the contemporary scenes of life in the DRC that he also uses.  

A staunch refusal to ignore the connection between the extraction of the DRC’s mineral resources—which also continues to wreak ecological devastation—and the conflicts fueled in the country remain a recurring theme. Baloji’s home region of Southern Congo sits on almost half the world’s known supply of cobalt. The country’s estimated 3.4 million metric tons of this mineral, essential in manufacturing key technologies from lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and computers to critical alloys, is in high demand. In the last decade, the expansion of industrial-scale cobalt and copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has led to forced evictions, environmental degradation, and human rights violations. The relentless questioning inherent to Baloji’s work highlights how the situation in DRC represents a continuing wave of environmental colonialism that is happening in many parts of Africa and the global South. 

In later works like the film,  Aequare. The Future that Never Was (2023), Baloji sets his sights on  the Equatorial forest and the Yangambi Scientific Center in the Congo Basin. Part of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the film—which is set in the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest—offers a poetic meditation on the circulation of colonial materials, plant matter and imaginaries of the future. Once again juxtaposing archival film clips with the present, Baloji expands on the ways that colonial-era agronomy in the Congo Basin  is connected to our current climate crisis through carbon off-sets, mono-agriculture, and deforestation. Offering what Sandrine Colard describes as a “poetic repurposing” of Congo’s location as the longest African landmass along the equator., Baloji invokes the equator (Aequare) as a new axis for the world map, and as a zone entanglement between the two seemingly disparate, over-determined axes of ‘North’ and ‘South’. Here, time seems more elastic, and the horizon, where the sunset and sunrise are at the shortest possible distance, becomes a place of radical temporal instability and imagining otherwise.

Casting a speculative gaze at the DRC’s future and our shared climate futures, Baloji imagines possible futures, alternative archives, and other registers in it. This practice, enshrined in the concept of lobi—a Lingala word that can mean past and future, depending on how it’s phrased—insists on the active presence of the past in the present. 

In October 2023, Baloji spoke to Mpho Matsipa with Tomi Seyi Laja about the Congo, how it inspires his work, the new directions he is exploring and climate change.

MPHO MATSIPA: Mémoire, your photomontage work from 2006 addresses the violence of resource extraction. In the series, you highlight the gaps in historical and colonial archives and actively engage with these records, focusing on themes like memory and meaning in quite a pointed manner. How did this project come about?

SAMMY BALOJI: The Mémoire series is about Lubumbashi’s mining heritage. Basically, I superimposed archival images onto the contemporary mining landscape of Congo. I was working with Johan Lagae, a historian in colonial architecture at the University of Ghent, conducting research in Lubumbashi. We were both interested in the colonial industrial heritage in Katanga. We spent a lot of time travelling to different cities and mining areas in the region and photographing what we saw. From there, I started to question the legacy and idea of the city. I began to wonder what came before the city, the mining exploitation that lies at the heart of the development of these cities, and the conditions of black people who were brought to Katanga to work in the mines. These questions led me to work on this photo montage. Johan was doing some of his research at AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, just outside of Brussels, and he invited me. 

Discovering the archives at Tervuren was surprising. It highlighted a part of the past I had never thought about, which no one taught me at school. Even today in Congo, there are no classes on colonial history and how all these systems were installed. There’s no objective, critical analysis of what it means for the country now.

Tervuren was my first time dealing with archives related to an institution. In Lubumbashi, I found negatives that the mining company abandoned. I found them without any literature or even captions that could give insight into the photographs. But in Tervuren, notes and captions guided the reading of the images. I found it very disturbing and very didactic in a colonial way. The texts promoted this hierarchy between white and Black and the way that all this civilization or even modern life was thought of and directed by Belgian administrators. I stayed in Tervuren for two months, working with the archives, and returned to Congo to prepare for my exhibition, which opened two years later. 

It was very interesting to see how Belgium has a lot of archives that no longer exist in Congo and, in terms of power, how many things are decided from Belgium. The archives became a tool I could use to try and understand both sides.

MM: And why do you think that’s important to know? What do you think is the role of history and memory in shaping contemporary and future Congolese or even regional consciousness?

SB: If you start to understand, for example, why we have nation-states in Africa in the forms they are today, you can question those borders. Congo borders nine other countries, and we have the same people living in different countries on each side of these borders. This is a result of the invention of Africa imposed from outside. As Africans, we had no say in this. So, we are struggling within a system that came from outside and still benefits the outsider rather than those inside. This is not just about history but about the present.

MM: One of the things that struck me on my last trip to Lubumbashi was the presence of Swahili, and how artists from Zambia were in effortless conversation with artists from the Katanga region. The distribution of Swahili works against the logic of the borders you are talking about. 

SB: Yes. Swahili is not a local language related to the Katanga region. It’s a language introduced after the First World War as a vocabulary for workers to find a common language for all these people from around the world. This vocabulary was necessary to create this possibility of communication between Belgium and people from other parts of the country and many neighbouring countries, going as far as Southern Africa. Only students supposed to become priests could learn Swahili as a whole language. 

So, when you were there, you realised that people from Zambia could speak with people from Lubumbashi. They’re the Lamba people on both sides of the Zambia and DRC borders. They speak in the Lamba language, which they share. This is what I was saying before. These borders are artificial and are dividing pre-colonial societies. 

MM: We’ve spoken a lot about your professional life. What aspects of your history and location in Katanga shape your research and art practice?

SB: Like every Congolese and Katangese citizen, I’ve experienced political and economic crises and ethnic conflicts. In 1990, suddenly, people from the Luba community, which I’m part of, were hated and rejected from Katanga province. It was a very upsetting and violent moment. I started to work to understand what it means to be from the same nation while having this kind of ethnic conflict, to understand where it came from. Through research, I understood that these ethnic identities were constructed during the colonial system. Historically, the Luba people came to the Katanga region with Belgians and were workers in the mine. After independence, they occupied high positions in the mining areas.

MM: I find your location in Brussels fascinating because I often feel that when people want to talk about colonialism or imperialism and extractivism, the only site for thinking about those questions about Africa is on the African continent. And yet, you are in Belgium, a country that hasn’t grappled sufficiently with its violent imperial history. The question around the nation’s constructedness and fiction is a question that one could also pose to Belgium. What was the reception of your work in Belgium? In some ways, you cannot think of Belgium without thinking of its twin, The Congo, which was central to the construction of Belgian identity. What does it mean to have these conversations in Belgium?

SB: I think this kind of conversation is just beginning. About two years ago, the Belgian parliament asked researchers, scholars, curators and other members of civil society to investigate this idea of decolonizing public space. This was after the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death.

In response to parliament our idea was not only to look at monuments, because somehow it’s really easy to attack these monuments. Instead, I proposed to look at all these international exhibitions that have happened since 1894. I was interested in looking at them as having two sites—a site of modernist engineering, development and sciences on the one hand, and colonies on the other.

I wanted to present the colonies and how the benefits extracted from them led to the making of modern Belgium. I was mainly interested in the Brussels International Exposition in 1897, which featured the Congo/Belgian pavilion. It’s a space where they showcased all types of products from Congo—wood, ivory, coffee, all these minerals and materials from Congo that could be transformed into products for the metropole. For this exhibition in 1897, the colony’s secretary brought wood and ivory [from the Congo]. He asked architects, artists and designers to work with all these new materials. It was interesting to see all these artists and architects working with these products from outside and explore how they contaminated and were equally contaminated by them. 

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For this exhibition in 1897, the colony’s secretary brought wood and ivory [from the Congo]. He asked architects, artists and designers to work with all these new materials. It was interesting to see all these artists and architects working with these products from outside and explore how they contaminated and were equally contaminated by them. 

It was equally fascinating to explore [the materials’] trajectories, how they went on to build houses and other buildings in Brussels, and how they taught. There’s contamination and dissemination in public spaces, buildings and even the education system. Our idea was to look at this contamination to return to the main issue, which is the transformation of Congo.

The transformation of Congo influenced the transformation of Belgium. That motivated me to work on our exhibition Style Congo: Heritage & Heresy, shown at CIVA (Centre International pour la Ville et l’Architecture) in 2022. Some well-known Belgian architects built these pavilions, and you can trace the Congo’s influence on some houses they made here and there across Belgium. Working with my co-curators, Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch and Estelle Lecaille, we could also retrace this movement of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and how they were linked to the colonial system. We were able to prove that. 

This kind of reconnection, which we made not by presenting a set of conflicts but instead by really rigorous scientific proof, was surprising. We could present evidence that clearly shows these links between the practice and its origins or its source of contamination.
A New Yorker article on the exhibition says it was the first exhibition of this kind in Belgium. 2023 is the year of Art Nouveau, and there are a lot of exhibitions going on here and there on the subject. Ours was one of the most visited, so we’re proud.

MM: This raises fascinating questions about this new-found enthusiasm for African modernism. And also to name, classify and display African architecture. What does that mean when you start to think about material histories and this question of contamination? I think that contamination is a very different way of conceptualising the traffic of goods between the Congo and Belgium that enables the production of these new forms of expression, these new kinds of aesthetic practices. And it’s different from talking about it as an entanglement. That there’s a much more direct line that is established. 

That makes it almost impossible to think about this architecture outside of its own colonial or imperialist production, which is deeply, deeply political. It also forces one to consider the afterlives of these materials historically claimed as signs of Belgian progress or artistic genius, and think about the conditions that made it possible and how it is even constituted in its materiality.

I find your engagement with materiality and materials as archival traces exciting. Specifically, I’m thinking about your work with copper. Could you say more about that? Questions of scarification and ornamentation are at the forefront of your work Sociétés Secrètes from 2015. You began working with copper and developed from your research of the Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. To the viewer, the copper works may appear as abstract ornamentation but then literally reflect body marking or scarification. What does the work of imprinting onto film show for you?

SB: What I thought to do when I was invited to the Venice Biennale, and knowing that the Biennale is an important platform to raise some big questions, was to buy raw copper, like raw copper coming from the mining company, and to find a way to inscribe it. My idea was to mark this raw copper block weighing 100 kg. It’s a square plate, and it’s heavy. My idea was to mark this copper block to trace its origin—it’s like inventorying these materials before they go out and can be moulded and mixed with other minerals. 

I had to think of what the mark should be. I decided to mark it with this pre-colonial knowledge from cultures that are not recognised and have been erased by both the colonial system and capitalism. I wanted to work with traces of this pre-colonial knowledge. I found all these so-called ethnographic photographs that were related to scarification and were classified as “body art”. I found the history and way these people were photographed quite problematic. When you look at the photograph, you are already comparing yourself and the person captured in the picture. I decided to remove, crop and keep the part related to the body art and inscribe these traces on the copper plate. 

Through my gallery, we could reach a mining company in Lubumbashi to buy the plates we needed. The company informed us that they’re not allowed to sell these cathodes to us as they were reserved by companies outside the country. We were not allowed even to have one copper plate, and I could have been arrested if found in possession of any. Congolese copper is for the export market. 

MM: That’s fascinating. I don’t know if, in addition to the term contamination, another level of disappearance happens. That there’s an unacknowledged contribution from the Congo that gets cannibalised or absorbed into other systems where value is ascribed. Some very weird metaphysics are happening around how the same commodity, the same material, is inaccessible. And it’s almost like it’s invaluable; you can’t buy it, it’s inaccessible, and then it has to pass through this threshold before it becomes available, and by then, it no longer carries any traces of its origin. I understand the use of the body markings to imprint and reclaim some recognition of these lost origins.

SB: Being able to engrave all the copper plates is also a statement that I have the right to do so. I can trace their origin and can see how it’s a benefit to everyone except those who are living in the place where the extraction is happening. The marking is also a way of claiming this reconnection and highlighting the inequality that is still going on.

As a photographer going through these archives, seeing how they are contaminated with this colonial perspective, I’m very aware that photography is a Western medium that arrived in Africa with colonisation. I wanted to have a space where I could inscribe new meanings with mediums that come from my culture—that comes from what has not been erased. Even though there’s always this propaganda of modernity, local cultures are not lost. I had to find another way of producing meaning, so I started to work with scarification and materials related to pre-colonial times. For example, I’ve been working on the 15th century period with textiles produced in the Congo region around this period. Working with these centuries comes with rejecting what Leopold said when he took control of the Congo, that the Belgians were bringing civilization to a part of the world that needed to be saved. It’s interesting to work not with ancient material but evoking them to contradict this race hierarchy and narrative. 

For me, one of the ways of working with these pre-colonial materials is more speculative. I also reintroduce the artwork in the White Cube [exhibit], which is not just a literal space but also a political one. Basically, it’s how to play with the circulation of products in this modern society by also introducing all this knowledge that has been erased through the circulation of these products. It’s these kinds of speculations I have been working on.

MM: …which points to possibly different futures and an expansion of the temporal frame, decolonising history and time. It doesn’t centre coloniality or colonialism so much, but actually recognises that there were other histories in which things were being made to access that history. What are your thoughts on how your research is quite speculative and what kind of futures it might point to?

SB: In the film I made for the Venice Biennale, I show that all these earlier expeditioners coming to Africa were collecting all types of data—including climate data. But, this was done as part of an attempt to figure out how to control the climate. This is why you have these botanical gardens in Europe, in which they can reproduce the climate and domesticate plants. 

In 1935, an architect called Henry Lacoste came up with the idea of building a huge pavilion. The idea was to recreate the four seasons in Congo in one building, with rivers, animals and people living in it. The Belgians [also] opened a centre for experimental agriculture, which operated 500 observation stations across the Congo, with the idea of accumulating climate data and trying to figure out how to control the climate and also how to export some plant species unique to the Congo to other parts of the world. For example, the rubber that was planted in Indonesia came from Congo. 

So, In Venice, I focused on climate change, with this history as the starting point. The film looks at the transformation of our local forests into monoculture with the idea of producing food for the world, not really for local consumption. This saw the development of these experimental agricultural centres, which destroyed indigenous plants to create these monocultures. I wanted to explore how it’s going to affect the environment now that we’re talking about the climate crisis.

In all these tropical zones, all the architecture we have is Western and is made and designed for Western, not local acclimation. Today, we face a climate crisis, and there’s this growing idea of what they call the “carbon offsets”. Now, the most powerful countries polluting the world are buying forests in Africa to pay their carbon taxes, allowing them to keep polluting. So, in a way, we are facing the same thing we were in the early 20th century. It feels like we are in a loop.

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Today, we face a climate crisis, and there’s this growing idea of what they call the “carbon offsets”. Now, the most powerful countries polluting the world are buying forests in Africa to pay their carbon taxes, allowing them to keep polluting. So, in a way, we are facing the same thing we were in the early 20th century. It feels like we are in a loop.

The future is not bright. Even the way we approach the future is mainly from a Western perspective—It’s about dividing time. I think the past and future all live in the present. The way that we’re looking at the past, we’re looking at the past from our present perspective, values, interests and urgencies. This is also the way that we’re looking at the future. There’s a word in Lingala that says the same thing. Whatever you want to talk about tomorrow, you use the same word as if you’re talking about yesterday. 

The word is lobi. 

In use, its meaning depends on the way you phrase it. If you phrase it in a future way, it’s about tomorrow. If you phrase it in the past, it’s about yesterday—the same word. It’s a fascinating way of thinking.