Past event

About

Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and farmer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His multigenre works are acclaimed for their decolonial Ejo Lobi (Africanfuturistic) style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. The evening comprises the first two parts of the Triptych, a project of recoding aesthetics—a representational practice rooted in Katondolo’s indigenous understanding of time and space. Matata (2019) draws up an inventory of Africa and the legacy of its representations; Kapita (2021) is inspired by the official job title given to Congolese charged with enforcing their white masters’ bidding over their fellow Congolese on sites of capitalist extraction and production. These two films are followed by Ndaliko Katondolo’s latest completed piece, Kumbuka, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Instead of reproducing aesthetics of (ostensible) transparency, Kapita makes the window itself visible, as a reality of a representation that lies about colonisation as a philanthropic and civilizing project, and the reality of an extractivism that reduces humans to function and form and ultimately annihilates them. Human functions and forms are melted and moulded like copper is melt and moulded.

Matthias De Groof

The Jack H. Skirball Series is organized by Bérénice Reynaud and Eduardo Thomas.