Alternative curated by Jean Kamba Unavailable

In Kinshasa, in 2023, the topic that kept coming up in discussions on everything from the arts to agriculture was how to build a “nonextractivist” economy. Senator Didier Mumengi Tshikudi decried a situation in which a renowned artist such as Chéri Samba had become a “resource” akin to copper and cobalt, mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and manufactured abroad into a commodity out of reach of most Congolese. In responding to these concerns, the artists’ collective, Mission Impossible, was founded in 2022 by Syntyche Mbembo, Christian Kakesse, and Stanis Mbwanga as a creative “laboratory” to take control of the display of their own works. They identify with Felwine Sarr's challenge for young Africans to “expand the field of what is possible and to design an African utopia, at once political, cultural, economic, and ecological” (Sarr in Douce 2018, quoted in part in the wall text)....