Histoires de miroirs

On the occasion of the Brussels-Capital Region's mission to Kinshasa, initially planned as part of the 60th anniversary of Congo's independence, to be held from 19 to 26 March 2022, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) has been commissioned to jointly produce an artistic project to be held simultaneously in the two capitals.

Over many years, the VUB has developed strong expertise in 'cultural diplomacy'. This is a practice that seeks to celebrate the city of Brussels in all its diversity as a cultural mecca, by developing intense links with a variety of partner cities around the world and, since 2019, particularly with Africa, notably Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC. This expertise will enable us to create a lasting bridge between Kinshasa and Brussels, ensuring the opening of a new chapter in bilateral relations at both cultural and academic levels.

Our reading, or rather "our readings" of this shared past under the colonial regime have a lot to do with the complexity and difficulty of being able to observe it with serenity and accuracy, and they fluctuate over time. It will have escaped no attentive observer that the question of the shared past and its legacy in our cities has been the subject of renewed and often critical interest in recent years. In the media, these subjects - parliamentary commissions, working groups on the traces of the colonial past in our cities, the issue of the restitution of cultural heritage and the decolonisation of the city in general - are given a prominent place.

At a time when a major mission from the Brussels-Capital Region is travelling to Kinshasa, it is more than opportune to ask ourselves: "Who are we in the light of these shared histories; what do we wish to remember about this uncomfortable past; and what joint actions would we like to undertake in order to get to know each other better and to be able to approach the past together in a clear and uncomplicated spirit?

This is why two key words quickly stood out in the development of this project: firstly, the idea of HISTORY, or stories. These stories, which link us together, have been the subject of extensive studies by academics in the DRC, Belgium and elsewhere, and whose results, findings, confirmations and surprises are insufficiently publicised. This creates a situation that paves the way for nebulous speculation and tendentious positions often found at the heart of the most heated debates accompanying the decolonisation process. Then came the idea of the MIRROR, firstly as an optical tool for turning the gaze around, and so inevitably becoming the symbol of a desire to approach the past with a fresh and precise approach; but also as an instrument of confrontation, the pitiless surface that accurately reflects the person looking at it and who we are, with no way of escaping.

The project was conceived by Henri KALAMA AKULEZ, Director General of the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts, and Hans DE WOLF, Professor at the VUB. It was then refined and developed by the various colleagues and partner institutions who support us. The basic idea is based on an imaginary situation in which we confront a master's student from the Kinsahasa Academy and one from the Brussels Academy with the themes of colonisation in history and the decolonisation of our societies today. We assume that in both cases the student will quickly find him/herself in a situation of discomfort due to the lack of reliable information. We would like to compare this situation with a jigsaw puzzle. The student pulls out of his or her memory the five or six elements that he or she spontaneously associates with these themes, as if they were five or six pieces of a jigsaw puzzle placed on a table... although it may take forty or forty-five of them to obtain a complete picture of a certain situation linked to the subjects.

However, this information does exist and is available. It has only been acquired by historians and other specialists of the colonial period who express it through scientific articles and books that will hardly find their way to the Academy of Fine Arts, and that should not even be the point. We are firmly convinced that the creative processes at the root of artistic creation have their own identity and follow a logic that is intrinsic to them. They are also fragile biotopes that need to be protected. So we need to find a way of sharing this active memory with fellow historians without upsetting the balance of artistic creation. That's what this project is all about.

Historian colleagues will therefore be invited to join the master's creation workshops in the two academies on a regular basis. They will find a seminar made up of around fifteen students working on the questions set out at the beginning of this note. They will participate informally in the ongoing debates by answering students' questions, but also by enriching them with inspiring narratives and introducing the students to the protagonists who have had the greatest impact on this or that aspect of our shared history.

It seems inevitable to us that the "jigsaw" to be completed will not be the same in the two cities, and that the questions asked will be different. It is for this reason that we feel it is essential to establish a dialogue between the two seminars from the outset.

STORIES OF MIRRORS was designed as an exercise in decolonization offered at the same time to master's students in the Academy of Fine Arts of Kinshasa and the Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. During the development of their projects, the students in the two seminars – who maintain permanent contact by videoconference – will receive visits from historians who have studied in depth the questions that accompany these historical and societal movements. Historians will join students in their quest for a clear and liberating understanding of this common page of history while respecting the artistic character of their work. The project is designed as a permanent dialogue between Brussels and Kinshasa which will take the form of a lasting seminar (organized every year) which is understood as the contribution of the academies and universities of the two cities TOGETHER to a debate which is of great news for this generation of young citizens.

Two inter-curricular research modules will explore questions related to history and de-colonial memory:

• Performativités dé/coloniales : GhostStories & Hantologies (Yalombo Castélie)
• Le commun des mortel.le.s : Mémoires matérielles et immatérielles (Nora Fluckiger Al Zemmouri / Juliane Lusson)