Eléonore Hellio

Born in 1966 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo)

In collaboration with Huguette Kilembi, Emery Mohamba, Blaise Mandefu, Irène Kamba, Mbuku Kimpala, Matthieu Kasiama, Jean Kawata, Mao Kinguza, Daniel Mumvunzi, Cedrick Tamasala. Eléonore Hellio’s interest in electronic arts arose in the beginning of the 1990s, when she became one of the main co-operating artists of the Electronic Café International. Today as an artist and a teacher, she develops open creative systems and educational programs in various contexts with numerous partners, most of whom are based on the African continent. Network Art, with or without technology, is at the heart of her practice. Since 1996, Hellio has been teaching art and media at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg and, since 2006, at Kinshasa’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. She organizes workshops, makes films, installations, performances and publishes texts and photographic work, as a solo practitioner and in collaboration with numerous life professionals, notably in the context of Kongo Astronauts, a collective that she founded in 2013 with performance artist Michel Ekeba. Simultaneously, she is involved in a wide range of art and research projects bringing together international thinkers around questions relating to the impact of digital globalization and challenges posed by the postcolonial era. On a regular basis, she collaborates with SPARCK, a multi-platform, experimental Pan-African curatorial platform, and has established the eternalnetwork.org hub.

Eléonore Hellio’s video Upside Down World is on view at KB17. Hellio herself, at pains to underscore that this is a collective work, elaborated with ten artists based in Lusanga whom she led in a 2016 workshop, explains that the video was filmed on the grounds of an ongoing project with which she has been closely associated. Initiated in 2014 by Dutch artist Renzo Martens in Lusanga, on a cacao plantation owned by the US conglomerate Unilever, the project bears the name CATPC (Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise). In part, the work is a response to the presence on the project site of an artwork by German artist Carsten Höller: a set of goggles that allow those who wear them to see the world upside down.  Well known on the Euro-American contemporary art scene, Höller’s goggles were discussed at length by the workshop participants as a metaphor for the “North’s” misreading of Congolese lives and experiences.