Congo Style

Front matter

From Belgian Art Nouveau to African Independence

RUTH SACHS

> AFRICAN PERSPECTIVES

Contents

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION Entangled Histories 1 Situating Modernist Sites 1 Totality and the Nation-State 3 The Public Lives of Built Forms 8 Shifting Focus 11 Biased Narrative in a Troubled Terrain 20 Affective Patterns and Dividing Lines 28 CHAPTER 1 Behind Congo Style: Navigating Research 31 A Question of Interdisciplinarity 31 Art History and the Congo 32 Categories of Culture 37 Inside and Outside Kinshasa 42 Reading, Writing, and Making Images 46 Between Labels and Archives 49

Chapter 2

Art Nouveau and the African Colony 53 Brussels, the Capital of Art Nouveau! 53 Birthed in Belgium 56 Colonial Theater: Hôtel Van Eetvelde 60

Introducing Art Nouveau via the Congo: The Congo Pavilion 63 viii

. Contents

The Fabrics of Innovation

Object Bodies and Embodied Design The Congo’ Influence on Art Nouveau What Was Left Behind in Belgium

Art Nouveau’s Influence on the Congo

CHAPTER 3 Style Congo in the Congo: Colonial Modernism Takes Root

Into the African City

Offshoots Sent to Africa

Iron and Infrastructure

The New Commercial Center: Leopoldville Leopoldville’s Vegetable Garden: Thysville

The Art Nouveau Village

Living Remains: The Courthouse, Mbanza Ngungu Brittle Modernism: Palace ONATRA, Kinshasa Narratives of Rust

Overgrown Categorizations

Part Il. Congo Style

CHAPTER 4 Modernism, Congo Style: Authenticity and Tradition

Authenticating the State Authenticity in Action

Modern Traditional Art

The Artists of Authenticity Mediating Kinshasa’s Modernism The Authenticity Paradox

CHAPTER 5 Kinshasas Congo Style: Sites of Postcolonial Identity

Giant Kinshasa Mobutu’s Modernism

The World Watches Kinshasa: May 20 Stadium and the

Presidential Park

67 70 74

77 80

Contents . ix

Kinshasa Climbs: Tower of the Exchange,

CNRT Tower, and Gécamines Tower 164 Authenticity and the Authentic City 177 Aesthetic Dependencies 181 Kinshasa Style 185

CONCLUSION From Total Artwork to Totalitarianism 188 Representing Regimes 188 Postmodernism after Authenticity 191 Living with Postcolonial Remains 193 Map of Kinshasa 199 References 201 Index 217

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11519375 frontispiece

9 10

11 12

14 15

ILLUSTRATIONS

Original drawing by the author, derived from images of the

Tower of the Exchange and a Congolese elephant inscribed onto a wall inside the Hôtel Van Eetvelde

View of the Tower of the Exchange in Limete, from the site of the Kinshasa International Fair (Kinshasa, 2015) Former ABC Hotel (Hotel Alimentation du Bas-Congo)

with an Art Nouveau top story and Art Deco base (Kinshasa, 2015)

A money exchange stall among statues by students of the Academy of Fine Arts (Kinshasa, 2014)

A view of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA),

still under construction (Tervuren, 2013)

A wooden structure by Georges Hobé from the 1897 Congo Pavilion, on the grounds of the RMCA (Tervuren, 2013)

The winter garden in the interior of Hôtel Van Eetvelde, built by Victor Horta in 1898, Brussels

The Hall of Exports by Henry Van de Velde in the

1897 Congo Pavilion, Brussels

The Hall of Ethnography by Paul Hankar in the

1897 Congo Pavilion, Brussels

View from the balcony of the ABC Hotel, Mbanza Ngungu (2014) The ABC Hotel settlement, Kinshasa (then Leopoldville,

The ABC Hotel settlement, Mbanza Ngungu (ca. 1915)

The ABC Hotel settlement, Mbanza Ngungu (2015)

A worker's cottage from the original Thysville settlement, Mbanza Ngungu, 2015

The Mbanza Ngungu courthouse (formerly the ABC Hotel), 2015 The Mbanza Ngungu courthouse balcony (formerly the

ABC Hotel), 2015

72 88

90 97

100 103 xii ° Illustrations

16 The balcony of Palace ONATRA (formerly the ABC Hotel), Kinshasa, 2015

17 The balcony of Palace ONATRA (formerly the ABC Hotel) from below, Kinshasa, 2015

18 The remains of colonial trains, Mbanza Ngungu (2015)

19 A five-zaire note from the Bank of Zaire

20 Publicity image of Mobutu widely circulated during the late 1960s

21 Musicienne, by Alfred Liyolo, 1970

22 Mural by Emile Mokengo on the National Institute for Social Security building, Kinshasa, 2014

23 Interior of Stade du 20 Mai, VIP room, Kinshasa, 1974

24 Grounds of the National Museum at Mont Ngaliema with maize plants growing, Kinshasa, 2014

25 Tower of the Exchange in Limete, Kinshasa, 2014

26 A view from the walkway at the Tower of the Exchange, Kinshasa, 2014

27 CNRT Tower, Kinshasa, 2014

28 The gardens of CNRT Tower, with the sculpture Messengers (1975) in the foreground (Kinshasa, 2014)

29 Gécamines Tower, Kinshasa (2015)

30 The former presidential suite, Gécamines Tower (Kinshasa, 2015)

31 The view from a balcony of Gécamines Tower, with cannonball hole (Kinshasa, 2015)

32 Cité Salongo, Kinshasa (2015)

33 Installation view of European Ghosts at Mu.Zee, featuring vitrines by Gustav Serrurier-Bovy, Ostend, Belgium (2016)

34 Looking out from Mont Ngaliema toward the Intercontinental Hotel, Kinshasa (2014)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been in the background and foreground of my daily life for almost ten years. From a sprawling theoretical PhD thesis written by a visual artist, begun in 2013, and numerous related artworks and exhibitions, to this publication, I have had a great deal of support. There are, consequently, a large number of people and institutions to acknowledge.

First, I am grateful to everyone at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), which was my home for six years. Sarah Nuttall, my primary PhD supervisor, introduced me to a rich and vibrant landscape of academic theory that is now essential to all my work. It has been a privilege to have had access to such a theoretical force. From the Wits School of Art (Visual Art Department), my PhD co-supervisor David Andrew never let me forget that I am an artist and a teacher, for which I will always be in his debt. Thanks to Emery Kalema, for his meticulous translations and intellectual rigor in all our projects together and especially his input into this research. Pamila Gupta generously gave her expert knowledge and was formative in my early conceptualization of how to think about ornamentation. Isabel Hofmeyr’s books continue to be a steady inspiration, as do our conversations. There were those who gave me substantial amounts of their time for discussion, reading of drafts, responding to conference papers, and the debate of difficult ideas. These include: Simon Gush, Cathy Burns, Corinne Kratz, Daniel Herwitz, Steven Jacobs, Jennifer Wenzel, Gary Minkley, Keith Breckenridge, Deborah Silverman, Nancy Rose Hunt, Hannah Le Roux, Candice Jansen, Noéleen Murray, and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt.

I am indebted to specialists in Kinshasa material culture from other fields who generously provided important ideas and directions for my research. Johan Lagae made time to catch up with me whenever I was in Belgium and set up a cornerstone of reference in architectural history on Kinshasa. Conversations with Sarah Van Beurden were highly generative and encouraging, and she was considerate enough to share some of her early research with me. Maarten Couttenier assisted me in navigating the Royal Africa xiv . Acknowledgments

Museum at Tervuren and discussing aspects of his scholarly investigations. Special thanks go to my colleague Emi Koide who graciously assisted with my research-related activities during our 2014 Kinshasa trip, alongside her own. Iam most grateful to my fellow academic and teacher, Henri Kalama Akulez, the current director of the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts, for his hospitality in Kinshasa and our lively debates. Patrick Missassi, the former director, kindly provided lodging at the academy in addition to voicing valuable insights and opinions. I was greatly saddened to hear of the passing of two of the original Avant-gardists who also treated my questions with patience. The figurehead of the post-independence Kinshasa modernist movement, Alfred Liyolo, passed away in 2019. Bamba Ndombasi Kufimba, the artist-writer of the group, passed in 2016.

For my research in Kinshasa, the list of people who I had conversations with is long and includes: Augustin Bikale, Yoka Lye, Kankonde Mbuyi, Sapin Makengele, Joseph Ibongo, Zola Kwandi, Francois Matondo, Rene Mpuru, Jacob Sabakinu, Vithois Mwilambwe, Louis-Joseph Kofi, Corneille Kanene, Martin Tshisuaka, Alexis Tshiunza, and Lema Kusa. Filip De Boeck, Pedro Monaville, and Joshua Walker were kind enough to share their ideas and experiences of field work in Kinshasa with me.

I learned a great deal through all conversations at the 2016 symposium Mediating Past, Present and Future of D.R. Congo's Historical Narratives on Art in a Global South Dialogue, that took place in Kinshasa at the Academy of Fine Art. I am especially indebted to all fellow members of the main organizing committee: Emi Koide, Mattias De Grooff, Patrick Missassi, Henri Kalama, and David Andrew. Gitte Zschoch and Robert Carruba also generously opened their Kinshasa home and ideas to me during this time. Thanks also go to those at the main archives I consulted: Anne Welschen and Lore Van De Broeck at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren; and Anne Lauwers and Francis Carpentier at CIVA, Brussels.

In recent developments, it has been fulfilling to interact with the curators of CIVAs group exhibition Style Congo: Heritage and Heresy (2023) and contribute an artwork. I appreciate that Sammy Baloji, Sylvia Franceschini, Nicholas Hirsch, and Estelle Lecaille were interested in my perspective on Congolese modernism and Art Nouveau, which they encountered in an early draft of this book.

The final stretch of preparing this manuscript for publication would not have been possible without the efforts of Shaifali Bramdev. Thanks also to my colleagues and students at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) Visual

Acknowledgments e xv

Art Department for being unfailingly supportive and enthusiastic. All my students, past and present, make me want to be a better scholar. I greatly appreciate my ongoing conversations with my friend Jaysen Naidoo for presenting points of view from outside of the Humanities. No acknowledgments to any of my projects would be complete without recognition of my loving and encouraging father, Benny Sacks.

This book was made possible with the generous support of the following awards and funding bodies: Wits PhD to Monograph Publishing Award (Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand); WiSER Doctoral Fellowship (University of the Witwatersrand); the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust; the National Arts Council of South Africa; the African Critical Inquiry Programs Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award; and a postdoctoral fellowship at the South African Research Chair for Social Change (University of Fort Hare).

Finally, I have tested the central ideas of this book at various conferences and workshops over the years. An early formulation of my methodology, as well as the case studies of chapter 3, appeared as “Lived Remainders: The Contemporary Lives of Iron Hotels in the Congo, Architectural Theory Review 22, no. 1 (2018): 64-82.

Introduction Entangled Histories

If the Congo did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. —Jennifer Wenzel, “Decolonization”

SITUATING MODERNIST SITES

This is a book about how the Congo was and continues to be imagined in Kinshasa. I outline the way that coproduced visions of nation, modernity, and stereotypes of culture have taken material form in the postcolonial city. My aim is to trace what remains of past presentations of the Congo in the rich textures of key architectural and artistic sites in Kinshasa today. The book traverses three contingent moments in state architecture and related visual art from a contemporary perspective: the 1890s (Art Nouveau, also known as Style Congo), the 1910s (early colonial modernism), and the 1970s (post-independence high modernism). I follow a theory of totalizing forms by way of the now notorious political regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo colony and Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire. My aim is to highlight what remains of total artworks in the sites of post-independence design orchestrated by the totalitarian African state. I draw on the current material situations of iconic remains, alongside existing archives, for what they can tell of lingering power relations and cooling nationalist fervor in contemporary urban space.

The lives of sites in Kinshasa today inform this book's trajectory. My starting point is colonial Art Nouveau in Belgium. I begin here in order to unpack architectural offshoots of the protomodernist design movement in the Congolese city, locating elements of Art Nouveau’s immersive imaginative power. The main focus of my analysis is Kinshasas relevant sites. Recognizing that the postcolonial African city muddies the notion of both modernism and modernity as a Euro-American enclave, I focus on how meaning is made in distinctive, historical city forms. I do so by implementing firsthand experiential analysis of iconic sites as whole entities, rather than only homing in on their architecture and designers’ intentions. My approach is based in my practice as a visual artist and is informed by how artworks and their exhibition have influenced how the Congo has been imagined and invented. The pages that follow therefore revisit key exhibitions, in addition to analyzing extant literature and archival material relating to aesthetics and the Congo.

While I hope this book will be useful to a broad range of scholars interested in the intersection of urban theory, postcolonial viewpoints, and modernist aesthetics, my interdisciplinary methodology will be most recognizable to creative practice researchers, art historians, and urban theorists, broadly conceived. The research methodology followed is that of a creative practice researcher in the sense that it is “personally situated, interdisciplinary and diverse” (Barrett 2010: 2). My situated approach involves combinations of archival research, textual and visual analysis, and experiential studies, including my own photographic practice. I proceed with the attitude that objects within postcolonial city space are, first and foremost, relational, relying on multiple associations across the present and the past. In this, I draw attention to the “specificity of situation” in which buildings and artworks are found, in addition to my own embodied experience of them (Doucet and Frichot 2018: 1).

I explore the prospect of the Global South city as a site for the creation of theory, a site whose complexity also instigates the imagining of the urban space as a relational entity (Robinson 2006; Simone 2019). My thesis is that how the Congo has been imagined through historical state sites and exhibitions, from both the colonial and post-independence eras, affects contemporary trajectories of remaining constructions. With some anchoring in Walter Benjamins (1999) dialectical image, which references both past plans and present conditions, I take a keen interest in what the physical realities of a site can tell of underlying power structures. Through the analyses that follow, I extrapolate how the complexity of the postcolonial built environment challenges the polarizing categories of colonial modernity. I am interested in how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist colonizing structures set in motion a series of divisions: “traditional versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies” (Mudimbe 1988: 17). I argue that modernist sites embedded in

Congolese urban space—used to entrench dichotomies—complicate and question didactic interpretations.

I build on work begun by Filip De Boeck and Marie-Françoise Plissart (2004: 228) regarding how Kinshasa breaks down the modernist separation of urban and rural. De Boeck and Plissart focus on the ethnographic relationship between urban reality and the city imagined by its inhabitants. I follow explicitly postcolonial concerns about the political underpinnings of modernism and their continued relevance. I draw on existing architectural histories of Kinshasa, most notably the body of literature by Johan Lagae, to pursue in-depth analyses of contemporary built environments.’ All my chosen examples once attempted to imagine the Congolese city as a place of abundant possibility that could be controlled. Those sites and artworks in Kinshasa, the main focus of this book, have not yet been the subject of study.

In tracking how the Congo appears in modernist forms (in relevant artworks and exhibitions as well as architectural sites), I tackle the way state-sponsored aesthetics from the past aimed to shape subjectivity. While they never completely succeeded, they hold a certain political memory within the contemporary city (figure 1). The forms of government that commissioned total artworks and caused totalizing design to come into being are important to my argument. Histories of how early modernist design was married to nationalism are key to understanding the former’s role in postcolonial Kinshasa.

TOTALITY AND THE NATION-STATE

At a time when Belgium, founded in 1830, needed to fortify an identity, an attempt was made to bind an idea of the African colony to a sense of national pride. In exhibitions and buildings promoting King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (CFS, 1885-1908), the early modernist Art Nouveau movement was prevalent. Art Nouveau was used to sell an idea of the Congo as a lucrative natural bounty in Hotel Van Eetvelde (1895), designed by Victor Horta and located in Brussels, as well as the 1897 Congo Pavilion, which formed part of the Brussels International Exposition. The year of this book’s publication, 2023, has been declared the Brussels Year of Art Nouveau. The strong connections between the Belgian movement and the African colony have not been highlighted across the primary narrative of this city-wide celebration. I argue

1. Please see the reference list for a portion of this extensive body of literature.

Fig. 1. View of the Tower of the Exchange in Limete, with the foot of a giant drummer in traditional garb visible (from the 1969 sculpture Batteur du Tam-Tam by André Lufwa) from the site of the Kinshasa International Fair, Kinshasa, 2015

(Photograph © Ruth Sacks.)

that nostalgia for Art Nouveau in Belgium today selects fragmented aesthetic aspects of former total artworks and ignores both its colonial associations and its underlying ideology. This book describes how Hôtel Van Eetvelde and the Congo Pavilion provide eloquent examples of the way King Leopold IIs regime incorporated Art Nouveau design into the colonial package. At the same time as these displays situated the culture of the colonized subject as an exotic other to that of Europe, Art Nouveau design provided a unifying frame, identified as uniquely Belgian.

The association between the modernist design movement and colonialism was taken further with industrialized versions of Art Nouveau that were sent to the Congo colony. Still-extant sites housing the prefabricated metal frameworks of the Hotels Alimentation du Bas-Congo (Lower Congo Foods Hotels, the ABC Hotels) continue to reveal their Art Nouveau lineage (figure 2). These structures were manufactured in Belgium and erected in approximately 1905-11 to serve as hotels connected to the Matadi-Kinshasa (then the

Fig. 2. Former ABC Hotel (Hotel Alimentation du Bas-Congo) with an Art Nouveau top story and an Art Deco base, Kinshasa, 2015 (Photograph © Ruth Sacks.)

Matadi-Leopoldville) Railway. Hotels that were once emissaries of the Belgian colonial mission are now aging organs within the body of the contemporary Congolese city.

Taking what I understand to be an African perspective, I argue that while the post-independence regime of Mobutu Sese Seko explicitly broke from Belgium's conception of the Congo as a colonial possession, it adapted stylistic tropes and spatial dynamics from Leopold II's regime. Both colonial Art Nouveau and post-independence state design perpetuated an aesthetics of control through the language of technological progress and economic prosperity. I therefore identify key aspects of the immersive and coercive qualities of Art Nouveau used to represent the Congo. Certain spatial and aesthetic features are then located in Mobutu’s modernism, as seen in the dictator’s state sites and the displays of artworks that accompanied them.

The sites installed at the beginning of Mobutu Sese Seko's three-decades rule (1965-97) hold distinct qualities that can be linked to the principles of the Art Nouveau environment. Within modernist sites that celebrated Congolese culture, continuations of caricatures of Africa were deliberately taken up as an act of self-representation. The sites and exhibitions erected under the banner of the state ideology of retour a lauthenticité (return to authenticity, what I will call simply Authenticity) were the first exemplars of the kind of modernism employed to describe the post-independence nation.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the government instigated a cultural policy aimed at rekindling elements of invented, precolonial tradition in Congolese daily life. Built forms, commissioned artworks, and exhibitions were wielded as the symbolic accruements of a mighty African power.

I address distinctive post-independence landmarks such as the Tour de Echangeur (Tower of the Exchange, c. 1974) and Tour Gécamines (Gécamines Tower, 1977) that have some affinity to the colonial sites under discussion. The postcolonial state constructions occupy prominent positions in Kinshasa, as do the artworks created to adorn them. When seen in relation to architectural projects, the work of a group of modernist visual artists known as the Avant-gardists further assists in evoking the post-independence nationalist imagination. Ostensibly made up of very different stylistic features to ornamental Art Nouveau and its prefabricated offshoots, Mobutu’s ambitious constructions and their artworks may be seen to display similar overriding principles of manipulating and totalizing built environments.

2. As will be discussed, earlier regimes from the post-independence era (1960-65) were too unstable to establish cohesive construction projects.

Belgium's Style Congo encompassed a combination of architecture, art, and interior design to create captivating artificial environments. In blending different art forms in one construction, inside and out, these were a form of total artwork or Gesamtkunstwerk (see Watelet 1981). Juliet Koss (2010, xiii) maintains that “modernism itself must be understood in reference to the theoretical elaboration and historical development of the Gesamtkunstwerk.” The foundational concept of the total artwork, closely associated with Wagnerian tradition, involves a merging of different arts (in this case, craft and high art, as well as ancient forms with modern). Because each total environment aimed at creating an illusion of unity and an organic whole, its tropes were often well suited to promoting nationalist agendas that sought to bind together a country’s different cultures. The total artwork also functioned on a political level, blurring the boundaries between art and life (Koss 2010: xix; Finger and Follet 2011: 4). In the era of African independence, the totalitarian Mobutu regime’s policy of Authenticity took effect across all aspects of cultural life and claimed to unify disparate peoples of the nation. I link the impossibility of national cohesion through culture to the false promise of harmony in the total artwork. The modernist principle of the total environment—and, by implication, total control—is always impossible to achieve.

The unfinished nature of the total artwork also functions as a way of “keeping it alive” (Schefer 2011: 35). My premise is that the artificial vision of lived harmony presented in the modernist sites of this book remains imaginatively and materially lively. The vitality of these sites’ presence in the city can never be completely disentangled from the regimes that made them, but neither do the sites wholly represent these regimes.

Mobutu’s modernist sites were conceived as an extension of the totalitarian state. Hannah Arendt’s (1973) definitive conception of totalitarianism sees it as a form of governance that maintains leadership through terrorizing the populace, not only political dissenters. If the regime’s public sites and artworks were instruments of the state’s agenda, they were presented under the banner of unity and cohesion. The principle of unity could also be wielded as a warning against stepping out of the prescribed frame. Yet the sites to be discussed were never purely tools of terror. The Mobutu regime’s versions of a Congo Style, or a design principle that claimed an idea of the Congo, are still a source of pride, valued highly as Kinshasa icons. In the case of Mobutu’s Congo, part of the appeal of the Authenticity policy was that the new African nation now had the power to represent itself. After decades of harsh colonial rule that imposed the physical and psychological violence of a modernity reliant on the intervention of Europe, the ability of an African government to utilize the forms of that modernity was symbolically powerful.

The ABC Hotel structures engendered by the colonial regime in the Congo, intended as prefabricated total artworks, and the state sites of the post-independence totalitarian government were awe inspiring in their time. But they were never completely autonomous enclaves or direct mouthpieces for their regimes. Just as the total artwork is always unfinished, the political regimes of this book, which terrorized the populace in their respective ways, were never entirely omnipotent or able to exert complete control. The two binding motifs of this book—the modernist total artwork and totalitarianism—do not provide the only keys for understanding constructions with complex meanings today. Sites erected by the governments of King Leopold II and Mobutu Sese Seko on Congolese soil are now framed by their urban surrounds. These, now as then, mediate the shifting reception of constructed symbols of the Congo and Congolese culture.

THE PUBLIC LIVES OF BUILT FORMS

Each site visited in this book has its own unique character that has been cocreated with its city. While this may be said of all constructions, those conceived to represent a version of the Congo are a way of glimpsing the momentous times of their birthing. In tracking the stylistic reverberations of parallel projects of nation-building between post-independence Congo and nineteenth-century Belgium, I use the African city as a space to think with.

In order to tease out more subtle, manifold narratives of public complicities and ruling persuasion, Congo Style addresses the public lives of buildings. My approach does not ignore the violence that underwrites these sites but seeks to relink these pasts to the realities of the present day. As I allude to the larger machinations of history, I address how built structures respond to the new demands of a changed regime and the blows of conflict and aging. Colonial remains and post-independence extravagances are made up of a multiplicity of meanings that reflect their eventful trajectories. Far from pristine, the significant edifices of the Congolese built environment function as more than merely representatives of historical eras. I therefore approach each site according to what its current material situation can tell of its singular history within urban dynamics. I focus on their experiential qualities more than their intended function.

Where the public is expressly informed what to think of Art Nouveau in the museums and heritage sites of Brussels, no clear label is provided in the Congo. Some guidebooks provide brief paragraphs concerning the origins and architectural styles of the buildings, but these are not easily accessible, as I detail in chapter 1. The legacy of historical edifices is more prominently given over to informal conversations and conjecture based on the various uses that they are put to. I form my opinions according to everyday experience and encounter as well as impressions of the sites themselves.’ I attempt to situate my descriptions of buildings and exhibitions within the particularities of their respective urban spaces. In an interpretation of recent thinking around new materialist theory (see Coole and Frost 2010), sites are approached as integral components within networks of man-made and environmental forces. I introduce architectural sites via my perception of the way they interact with their surrounds, made evident and tangible in the material traces overlaying them. While I metaphorically excavate built and crafted matter for the ideology programmed into their initial design, I am also open to what the present-day corporeal conditions of the structures can say to potentially counteract original messages.

Addressing the way architecture and its artworks are (and are not) integrated into the cultural and material circuits of their surrounding urban space reveals a lot about their initial design and its practical facilities. Importantly, this allows for consideration of the communal role sites play among other structures and variegated forms of formal and informal civic activity. I approach buildings as active agents within complex urban constructions that change over time. The different sites are treated as whole objects, whose interiors and allotted city space are integral components. A version of this way of thinking about design and exhibition space was introduced in the organic logics of the Art Nouveau total artwork. I believe this speaks to the complex legacy of the early modernist movement.

Taking a cue from Arjun Appadurai (1986: 5), I seek meaning in “the things themselves,’ inscribed in their form and use. I pursue each site as having an active and public social life, animated by eventful histories that date back to tense origins. Instead of employing history as a source of facts to bolster visual analysis, this study looks at what traces and residues can

3. In cases where sites no longer exist, or are not accessible, I center others’ photographs in my analysis, offering firsthand description of my own engagement with these photos. Sections where this process occurs are clearly marked.

reveal about interactions with people, things, and natural forces. Rather than detract from the original designs, this line of inquiry adds further layers of significance and nuance to historical constructions. By providing situated perspectives, I aim to circumvent the typical paths of those art historical texts that read architecture purely in terms of the message its commissioners and designers intended. I eschew a narrative dominated by the motivations and biographies of architects and the terms of their stylistic development within a closed system of architectural categories. Rather, I trace the temporal affectivities of whole sites over time, with the aim of freeing my analyses from the “fictitious abstracts” of “classes, species and kinds” (Deleuze 1988: 45).

My intention in exploring material traces is to underscore that our knowledge of history is “fundamentally relational” and only able to be grasped through the lens of the present context (Geissler et al. 2016: 15-31). Following a relational logic, I perceive architecture and artworks not as isolated but as emplaced within sites that affect their function and meaning. These emplaced forms are introduced as objects of the present time, interlaced with the residue of the past. Instead of providing conclusions to central questions based solely in archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, I seek impressions of thick and overlapping times. My aim is to confound a linear reading of these works’ history, according to what they can tell. Drawing analyses of historical edifices into the harsh light of present-day Kinshasa problematizes moralizing tales of the villains and heroes of Euro-American history as well as the hagiography of its architects and modern artists.

I do not ignore archival research or information provided by architects, designers, and artists. Rather, I recognize that complex designs carry some of the history and societal attitudes that influenced their making. As such, they can be recognized as articulations of past and present powers. As buildings and objects are claimed by their respective localities, from high-end official decree (becoming heritage sites or government and civic buildings) to informal networks on the ground, they represent different Congos. In reading the lines these constructions draw, within pockets of space and sky, and the wider connotations of their permutations that follow, I proceed with an awareness of the polarizing and essentializing philosophies that potentially underscore modernist form. I also allow for surprises, looking for possibilities that these have been overwritten, inventively reconfigured, or ironically refuted.