It is one of the poorest parts of the planet, a place where workers earn $1 a day – which is why, according to one artist, the plantations of eastern Congo really need an art gallery
Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian - Tuesday 16 December 2014
Next month, Renzo Martens,
along with his wife, son and baby daughter, are going to live in
eastern Congo so he can continue his five-year plan to gentrify the
jungle. The 41-year-old Dutch artist is trying to create an arts scene
in one of the most impoverished parts of the world.
It sounds like a sick joke. “It’s not,” Martens tells me when we meet
in London. “I mean, it’s funny to call your programme a central African
gentrification programme, but I’m basically putting a white cube in the
forest to see what it does.”
There’s a little more to it than that. Martens is artistic director of an outfit called the Institute for Human Activities,
which has helped artists from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, establish a critical curriculum akin to a
foundation arts course for plantation workers. The Congolese Plantation
Workers Art League has now started to organise exhibitions of
self-portraits. At workshops, workers’ children drew what they imagined
their futures would be. “Most of these kids had never had a pencil in
their hands before,” he says.
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