Friday 23 October 2009

18:30  Juju Factory (film, 97 min, 2006)
20:00  The Nigger Who Dared Conquer The Sky (lecture in English)
22:00  We Too Walked On The Moon (film, 15 min, 2009)

The exhibition Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba is accompanied by a series of events under the title Thinking Architecture, including lectures by critic Kobena Mercer (UK) and filmmaker Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda (DRC) as well as a series of screenings examining the legacy of Lumumba.

The film Juju Factory invites us to read a dense net of references and allusions, names and phantoms, memories and nightmares. With the help of the writer Congo Kongo, the filmmaker leads us through Matonge, a district in the south of Brussels, renamed after a commercial district in Kinshasa; the journey evokes images that need to be read. The face of Patrice Lumumba cross-fades beneath the surface; it appears alongside the rhymes of young rappers; it looks back from the wall of the writer's apartment, framed like a precious souvenir. A whispered question echoes amidst the remembrance: what have we made of ourselves?

Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda is currently working on a new film on Patrice Lumumba, and rather than giving conventional answers he returns to basic questions: who was Patrice Lumumba whose influence spread across the borders of Congo? Why have the United States, Belgium and other western countries made him a mortal enemy? Why did he become a quasi-living legend in the course of his short life and brief career? The lecture is set up as a ‘production room’: a conversation between a filmmaker preparing a film production on Lumumba and the public which could play the role of board of producers.

Born on October 30th 1957 in Kinshasa, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda studied sociology, history and philosophy in Brussels, Belgium. He trained in cinema in France, the United Kingdom and the United States. As a writer and a poet, he has researched and analysed African cinema. He currently also teaches and was invited in 2006/2007 by New York University to lecture at the NYU-Ghana campus in Accra.

This program is curated by Annett Busch and is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, and deBuren.