A photography and installation-based art practice that looks at urban design and archives as infrastructures of colonialism and contributors to climate damage
Context
In much of the world, including swathes of Africa and South America, problems of (neo)colonial domination, human rights abuses, conflict, and climate damage intersect in a system that profits powerful multinational corporations and states, and exploits those who labour in the plundered lands and seas. In many such regions, formal independence from colonial rule changed little in terms of structural inequality. And in some regions, former colonial buildings and cityscapes not only stand as reminders of the past, but continue to function as sites of neocolonial capitalist enterprise today, serving as headquarters for logging or mining multinationals, for example. Exposing the histories and present-day workings of these sites is important for informing and inspiring people to transform them. Tackling spatial and social structures simultaneously, with the realisation that people and place are intimately connected, can help achieve a more holistic, ecologically and socially just, future. Such an intersectional, and historically-informed exposure of exploitation can confront powerful elites who perpetuate a state of amnesia that severs the past from the present in order that exploitative practices of the past can continue. Resource extraction is a prime example of this programmed amnesia.
Practice
The economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is largely fuelled by copper, rubber, uranium, lithium, and coltan production. When Belgium occupied the DRC, nearly all Congolese copper was extracted and exported for large-scale industrial use, damaging local infrastructures and livelihoods. Copper still plays a central role in the country’s economy, but also in its political conflicts and environmental damage. Mining occupies land otherwise useful to communities for growing fresh produce, and copper mining’s waste products poison drinking water, farmland, and habitats. Tacking up W. E. B. Du Bois’ argument that the material and discursive origins of European monumentalism, such as the gleaming boulevards of Brussels, were found in the brutal colonial regimes of the Congo, the Congolese artist Sammy Baloji explores this legacy as an ongoing system of exploitation. He uses photography and installation to extend Du Bois’ idea and take the reverse view to look at European traces in Congolese cities and archives as evidence of ecological and social violence.
Baloji often focuses on how ecology and urbanism intersect in his hometown, the city of Lubumbashi in Katanga province. As in many regions of the world where space is separated along race and class lines to suppress solidarity, in Lubumbashi architecture and urban planning serve spatial and social structures of colonialism. The city was designed in a segregated system whereby the quarters of miners are separated from other areas, and black communities kept apart from white ones by a “cordon sanitaire”: a physical separation of more than 500 metres. His photography installation Essay on Urban Planning (2013) denounces colonial eradications of local identities through methods of city segregation. In other works, Baloji collages photographs of colonial rulers and local servants on top of contemporary photographs of landscapes damaged by mining. The combination of archival and recent images testifies to his continued interest in the afterlives of colonialism in present-day geological damage, and the sedimented layers of history in the Congolese landscape.
“I am not interested in colonialism as nostalgia, or in it as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system”, states Baloji. Baloji’s approach to the complex and ongoing afterlives of colonialism in the DRC is an example of how intersectional understandings can guide sensitive approaches to art practice, design, architecture, curating, and much more. Baloji’s work in photography and installation is powerful in its refusal to separate intersections of mining, colonialism, racism, climate damage, and warfare.
By looking at how colonial architecture is occupied and sometimes reappropriated today, Baloji also gestures at how contemporary architects, planners, and organisers must create more inclusive spaces—both in former colonial seats of power and their former territories—by designing or repurposing buildings with a sensitivity to climate justice and a commitment not to repeat inequities of the past. In contexts of architecture and beyond, inviting people to think politically about spatial and social justice, and mobilise change, has huge potential in helping face the climate emergency. Exposing the networked relations of extractive capitalism and colonialism that have led to climate damage and its ensuing social injustices is paramount.