Can a city exist without architecture? And what is architecture?
How modern is modernity? How universal is urban planning?
Can urbanity be immaterial? Which urban visions does it rely on then? These are the questions at the heart of Kinshasa, The Imaginary City.
As the former capital of Belgian Congo, Kinshasa occupies an important place in the history of Belgian architecture and urbanism. Today Kinshasa has become a postcolonial African city, where alternative modernities are generated and new local and global identities forged.
With the exhibition Kinshasa, the Imaginary City the curators intend to stimulate the ongoing debate on the contemporary Central-African urban scape. It is a specific urban reality which invites us to question and rethink the classic urban paradigms.
In western discourses and reflections on how to plan, engineer, sanitize and transform the urban site and its public spaces architecture has been given a prominent place. It is, almost naturally, viewed as an indispensable dimension for the creation of an urban identity. Indeed, one can hardly underestimate the importance of the built form and of the material infrastructure if one wants to understand the ways the urban space unfolds and designs itself. However, in a city such as Kinshasa, the infrastructure is of a very specific kind. Its functioning is punctuated by constant breakdown, by failure and by absence. The exhibition is not, therefore, solely focusing on the city’s material infrastructure or the urban colonial legacy. Rather, it comments upon Kinshasa’s urbanity, which exists beyond the city’s architecture.
The city’s main infrastructural unit is the human body. Body-building and sape (this is the corporeal aesthetics which is so typical for Kinshasa) are amongst the most meaningful activities in the urban space. In a very real sense, the body is Kinshasa’s only building that is constantly constructed and perfected. The social relations between the more than six million urban dwellers generate an impressive sense of collectivity. Kinshasa’s inhabitants quite literally embody the market, the street, the garage, the church... the city. More importantly, even, these bodies form the locus of much of the invisible modalities of urban action. They moor the city’s urban imaginaries.
Therefore, the exhibition Kinshasa, the Imaginary City zooms in on the topography of this autochthonous Congolese imagination. It offers an interpretation of the city as mental space, revealing its existence beyond the city’s visible geographical and physical reality. Underneath the surface of the material city lurks a second, invisible city. A city that exists in the autochthonous mind as a mirroring reality of the visible world. Much of the current Congolese social crisis, the subjectivity of which is lived and experienced most strongly in precisely this urban locale, situates itself in this slippage between first and second world, between visible and invisible, life and death, day and night, or between reality and its double. This has all kinds of repercussions for the ways in which the city understands and creates itself.
The city’s collective religious imagination, given form by the prominent presence of churches, clearly indicates the ways in which the invisible is overgrowing the city’s visible reality. The encroachment of Kinshasa’s churches on public space illustrates the force of their vision of the city at the centre of a new order that will start on Judgment Day. The religious transformation which Congolese society is currently undergoing has squarely placed the city in a new temporality, that of the apocalyptic interlude. A religious experience, with frequent references to the Apocalypse, Golgotha, Sodom, Gomorrah, or the theme of the living dead (les morts ne sont pas morts), constantly interferes with the ‘real’ physical urban reality in which city, cemetery and refuse-heap blend into each other. The religious urban practices, such as public confessions at televised mass meetings, exemplify the changed relations between public and private space. They are also indicative of deeper changes within the city’s social networks and moral and ethic matrixes that constitute the family, kin relations and ethnic affiliations.
Within this complex field shaped by survival strategies, religion, and a city that, for lack of material means, ‘builds’ a form of zero degree architecture, urbanity can no longer be understood from a common perspective on architecture as ‘art of building’. In order to point to the relative place architecture occupies within this urban field, and in order to interpret the city beyond its architecture and to transcend the prevailing narcistic architectural critique, the project Kinshasa, The Imaginary City relies on anthropological insights.
The exhibition and accompanying book result from the intensive collaboration between anthropologist Filip De Boeck, photographer/filmmaker Marie-Françoise Plissart and architect/curator Koen Van Synghel. In 2000, after many years of field research in Kinshasa, De Boeck met Plissart at her first Kinshasa exhibition. In the following years, they returned several times to the city together. Plissart’s photos and videos date from the period 2000¬2002, whereas the video material of De Boeck and Van Synghel was produced in 2004.
RELIGIOUS TV CHANNELS
Over the past ten years Kinshasa has witnessed the rise of a whole range of Christian fundamentalist churches, often referred to as Eglises de réveil, churches of spiritual awakening. Many of these churches have their own private TV channels. One of the most popular is RTMV (Radio et Télévision Message de Vie, Radio and Television Broadcast Message of Life). This TV channel is owned by one of Kinshasa’s most successful preachers, Fernando Kutino, founder of a church named the Army of Victory (Armée de Victoire). The channels mostly broadcast religious music, masses and prayer sessions. And TV itself, omnipresent in the living room but also in more public spaces such as bars and restaurants, greatly contributes to the religious transfiguration of the public sphere.
SOAP SERIES FROM NIGERIA
The religious TV channels regularly broadcast soap series and films produced in Nigeria and Ghana. These films, originally in English, are translated live into Lingala. Some of the translators, such as the well-known José de Jésus, have become stars in their own right, while certain films, such as Kiriska, have strongly impacted on Kinshasa’s collective imagination. This 1998 Nigerian feature film tells the story of a young girl, Karishika, the queen of demons. The end of time is approaching. Seeing that everybody has started praying in the charismatic churches, Satan is concerned that hell might depopulate soon. He therefore sends his emissary Karishika from hell to the world to come and win souls for him. Karishika sets out and starts winning souls by seducing men, but she does so in such a brutal and dangerous way that God becomes annoyed. In the end Good wins over Evil. The figure of Karishika has become emblematic of Kinshasa’s ‘witch-children’. As such, West-African fiction has grafted itself upon Kinshasa’s collective imagination and has become instrumental in shaping its daily lived realities.
LES MORTS NE SONT PAS MORTS (THE DEAD ARE NOT DEAD)
“In the history of this world, ever since its creation until today, the life of Man ends with death. Man is alive when he lives, but dead when he no longer lives. However, in analysing today’s topic we will comment upon this fact: the dead are not dead, they are active in the ‘second world’. According to the Bible they are not dead until the Last Judgment. In the next few lines we will elaborate upon this thought. The dead are not dead due to their preceding actions that have made them immortal, as we have illustrated above, a person’s acts which will never be forgotten. And by connecting this logic to the Bible, we will see that the dead will be judged according to the acts that posed before their death. These acts never die, in a way. This also illustrates that the dead are not really dead. They are somewhere while waiting for a judgment of their previous acts.”
THE FUNERAL CHAPEL
In Kinshasa, death has become embedded in altered structures of solidarity, of kinship and relations of gerontocracy, as is attested by the changing position of the noko, the maternal uncle, whose authority constantly diminishes, most notably in matters related to death:
“Today, in the white man’s village (the urban cite), things have changed. In the village where we come from, the maternal uncle was a chief. If a problem arose in the family, people called on him for advice and guidance. Today, the uncle has lost that status. In the city, the uncle has become a useless thing, considered by many as a sorcerer, especially by all who pray and for whom things traditional are satanic. Before, when we buried a dead body, it was the uncle who addressed the family, and when we returned from the burial place, it was the uncle who ‘lifted the palm branch’ (formally ended the mourning period). The uncle was the ‘owner of the dead person’, he was the first responsible. Today, the uncles have multiplied. They are now three. The
actual uncle is considered a nuisance. People flee him for fear he will ask a contribution to the funeral. He no longer addresses the family. Instead the preacher has become the uncle who speaks and directs the mourning ceremony. And the third uncle is Cataphar (from catafalque, funeral chapel). Before, the uncle received funerary gifts from the attendants during the funeral.
Now these gifts mainly go to the preacher and to Cataphar, for the payment of the location of the draped chapel. The preacher and the funeral chapel have become the new uncles, whereas the real uncle now hides during funerals for fear of being accused of the deceased person’s death.”
(Interview during a mourning ceremony, Camp Luka, September 2000).
The ‘multiplication of the uncle’ in this mortuary context points to the changed place accorded to death itself in the public sphere. Today, the elder, traditionally the authority in family matters related to the management of death, has lost this position to the young. They appropriate the dead body, carry it out of the compound, and walk it through the streets, singing and dancing. Here death has become a moment to rebel against the general conditions of life. While accepting the inevitability of death itself, youngsters kidnap the dead body and throw it into the public domain, as a way to contest against the living conditions which were at the origin of this death.
WITCH CHILDREN
The changed meaning of the gift is evidenced by a widespread urban phenomenon, that of ‘witch children’. In Kinshasa, children are increasingly accused of witchcraft. They are held responsible for the illness, death and all other forms of misfortune befalling their parents and relatives. Children are thought to become witches by accepting a gift (bread, fruit, biscuits, a glass of water) from an adult person, often in public spaces like markets and shops. But what poses as gift at first reveals itself to be of a totally different nature and ties the child into a forced debt relation with the giver. At night, the adult will come back to claim a counter-gift in the form of human meat. From that moment onwards the child will have to kill in order to pay off the contracted debt. As a result of these accusations, thousands of children undergo exorcizing rituals in the churches. After this ritual cleansing, their reinsertion in their families often remains problematic. Many children end up living in the street.
THE BODY
The (re)making of social coherence in the city is only partly generated through its material infrastructure. In the African city the main infrastructural unit is the human body. The manner of production of space and time in the city is inextricably connected with the production of the body. In sharp contrast with the decrepit state of the city’s material infrastructure, Kinois put a tremendous amount of energy not only in surviving, in feeding, clothing, healing and keeping their bodies alive, but also in building their bodies into a state of beauty and perfection. For the Kinois, the body is the basic tool in the cultural realization of the self, and in the creation of the city’s private and public spheres. Certainly in Kinshasa’s youth cultures, identity is expressed corporeally, through dress and dance, as much as it is expressed discursively. The physical body, with its specific rhythms, thus determines the rhythms of the city’s social body and generates the relational networks through which the urban space is shaped.
LA SEMENCE (SEED)
The églises de réveil have launched the phenomenon of semence, which means seed, under the motto: “Give to God and He will give you back” (pesa Nzambe, akopesa yo). References to semence on advertisements for churches and shops abound in every street. Most miracle churches draw ever larger crowds, while the gifts, the seeds that are sown by the believers, only continue to grow in importance. People ‘sow’ watches, jewellery, diamonds, money, cars and houses to obtain a miracle, a job, a marriage, healing, children, prosperity or a ticket to heaven. As such, all gifts made to the church become, in a certain way, short or long term investments: one sows in order to harvest personal material gain, here and now, or in the afterlife.
The notion of semence illustrates the shift from a gift to a onetary logic in the urban context. It also illustrates the profound restructuration of kinship patterns. What counts in these new religious arenas is no longer the group, but one’s own individual realization, obtained through one’s own work. Until recently, the extended family was regenerated through a never-ending flow of gifts and transactions between its members. These gifts created a vast open-ended social field, characterized by the strong moral obligation to share amongst relatives, distant or near. In the new religious field, however, the family ties are being redefined in more restrictive ways. The churches strongly promote the nuclear family at the expense of the extended family as it existed until recently. As a result, all those who fall outside of the scope of the nuclear family are increasingly being denied the right to ask for assistance. More distant family members are no longer seen as kin but as strangers, and they are labelled as evil witches when they attempt to call upon a logic of kin-based solidarity.
THE RIVER
The riverbanks and ports of Kinshasa reveal the stunning material geography of failing infrastructure, a spectacular architecture of decay which constitutes the physical life of crisis. Sunk, immobilized, stuck in the mud and entangled with floating carpets of hyacinth, most of the large boats were dismantled and turned into squatters’ camps a long time ago. Still afloat, patiently waiting between these corpses, are hundreds of baleinières, wooden boats with outboard motors. These are the boats that transport people and goods back and forth between the Congo river and a vast network of waterways in the interior of the country. Yet, in spite of the decay, the myriad activities and the whole web of informal economies that have spun themselves around the river and the city as a whole, have given birth to multiple technologies of fixing and repairing. They form a constant reminder of the productivity of degradation and its capacity to invent new material structures and generate and moor social ties.
The exhibition was commissioned and realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community for the 9th International Architecture Biennale of Venice 2004. The Belgian pavilion received the Golden Lion for the best country’s pavilion.
Curators: Filip De Boeck and Koen Van Synghel
Commissioner: Vlaams Architectuurinstituut (VAi), Katrien Vandermarliere, director, Saskia Kloosterboer and Gert Renders, project managers
Photography: Marie-Françoise Plissart
Videos: selection of fragments of the film Un jour, l'avenir nous donnera raison de Marie-Françoise Plissart in collaboration with Filip De Boeck.
Camera: Marie-Françoise Plissart.
Producer: Michel de Wouters productions. 2002
Video interviews: Vincent Lombume Kalimasi, writer, Yoka Lye Mudaba, writer, Adelin N’Situ, psychiatrist, Thierry N’landu Mayamba, human rights activist. Interviewed by: Filip De Boeck and Koen Van Synghel, Kinshasa, 2004.
Camera and sound: Koen Van Synghel. Editing and subtitles: Jos De Gruyter and Jana Phlips. Translation: Filip De Boeck, Césarine Bolya en Greet Pernet.
Films: Karishika, Director: Producer: Christian Onu. Producer: Ifeani Ikpoenyi. Artistic director: Adim C. Williams. 1998
Evangéliste Kiziamina Kibila Jean-Oscar. ‘Si ton Dieu est mort essaie ‘le Mien’’. Congo pour Christ ‘C.P.C.’. Producer: Ministère ‘La puissance de Jésus-Christ’.
Texts: Filip De Boeck and Koen Van Synghel.
© Marie-Françoise Plissart, Kinshasa, collage, 1,20 x 1.80 m. 2000
The VAi is subsidized by the Flemish Community.
Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City has been published as a sequel to the presentation of the exhibition. Writer: Filip De Boeck, Photography Marie-Françoise Plissart, Design: Dooreman
ISBN 90-5544-528-2. Publisher: Ludion www.ludion.be