Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Lucie Kamuswekera's¹ embroideries are not popular paintings, but they are very close to them, even if the latter are usually no longer found in Congolese homes. Born in 1944, Lucie Kamuswekera, who prefers to be known as Artiste Lucie² (Fig. 1), belongs to the generation of Congolese for whom these paintings reflected the memories and experiences lived between the 1950s and 1990s. In her embroideries, she mostly revisits the iconotheque of popular painting by visualizing the experiences of women, but sometimes raises issues of worldwide relevance, like the COVID pandemic (Fig. 2). Explicitly, the artist's mission is to give relevance to past and present experiences, to reinscribe them in the collective life and reestablish intergen- erational links. In Congolese urban culture, the reception of the image is performative. Like a mask in a ritual, her embroideries intervene in social life and relationships. They carry...