LUMENE

22 March 2023 - Kuumba

LUMENE, a film by David Shongo

Screening at 20h.

[The film screening will be followed by a discussion between artist David Shongo and curator and journalist Ayoko Mensah].

'Lumene' is a documentary-series project by David Shongo funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Rietberg Museum in collaboration with the University of Zurich. The film is part of an art installation to be exhibited at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich from 17 March to 17 September 2023.
In the first part of the film, titled Privatisation, David Shongo reflects both artistically and intellectually on the process of privatising memory and space, using the photo archive now kept at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.
These photographs were taken between 1938 and 1939 by German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber. While in Congo, Hans Himmelheber travelled to Bandundu, Kwilu, Kasai and Kwangu, where David Shongo's father was also born, whom he did not know and whose history is marked by absence.
David Shongo's research therefore becomes a personal search for his own memory and the history of his father, who died in 1998. In this search, he encounters a society that, like him, is bereft of its memory and a region still marked by the traces of the colonial enterprise and the expeditions of European ethnographers and anthropologists.