Kongo Astronauts

Born Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), 2013.
Live and practice where time and place allow

Brought into being in 2013 by artists based in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kongo Astronauts navigates the vertigo of multiple, parallel worlds. Faced with the violence of today’s robotically enhanced planet, Kongo Astronauts responds with art. Never fixed – for it is a collective whose membership is ever in flux – Kongo Astronauts builds upon differences and upon the confrontation of diverse experiences, corralled, all, in an attempt to resist the psychological ghettos that characterize lives lived in the postcolonial era. Kongo Astronauts manifests in the interzones of digital globalization, wherein past, present and future collide, impacting politics of intimacy and identity in urban and rural settings alike. At work and play in the field of post-disciplinary action, Kongo Astronauts materializes in cosmic appearances and polysemic fictions (performances, films, texts, photos…), immersing viewers/listeners/bystanders in a multidimensional engagement with the experience of exile and the quest for survival.

SPARCK has chosen to show three films by the Kongo Astronauts collective, all associated with a series titled Postcolonial Dilemna. All three speak to the artists’ refusal to take at face value the world they inhabit and their insistence on seeking out alternative ways of engaging with and bypassing its political, economic and psychological violence. The third film, Postcolonial Dilemna Track #03 (Unended) is properly oneiric. An astronaut ambles through a tropical forest, making his (her?) way toward a massive waterfall. The astronaut is a key protagonist in several of the collective’s “works”:  unscripted performances in the streets of Kinshasa, an ever-expanding series of photographs by Kongo Astronauts and by others, films such as the one seen here, music videos (for example by Congolese rapper Baloji and new and upcoming Kinshasa-based group Mbongwana Star). The astronaut is a perplexing persona, unnamed, mysterious, ever changing, as the artists transform her/his appearance. Here, the notion of the cyborg exits the realm of science fiction to enter that of the every-day world, questioning in richly poetic image-ways terms of engagement with a post-capitalist order determined to do away with such exquisite spaces as the landscape the astronaut is traversing.