FLORENCE.- Since 2005, Sammy Baloji has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is an ongoing research on the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as a questioning of the impact of Belgian colonization.

His use of photographic archives allows him to manipulate time and space, comparing ancient colonial narratives with contemporary economic imperialism. His video works, installations and photographic series highlight how identities are shaped, transformed, perverted and reinvented. His critical view of contemporary societies is a warning about how cultural clichés continue to shape collective memories and thus allow social and political power games to continue to dictate human behaviour.

As he stated in a recent interview : « I’m not interested in colonialism as nostalgia, or in it as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system. »

Sammy Baloji (b. 1978 in Lubumbashi, DR Congo) lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. Sammy Baloji started in September 2019 his PhD artistic research project « Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: towards a Reconfiguration of Identity and Geopolitics » at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.

A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Prince Claus Prize, the Spiegel Prize of the African Photography Encounters of Bamako and the Dakar Biennale, and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. For the year 2019-2020, he is a resident of the Académie de France à Rome - Villa Médicis. Since 2018, he teaches at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg. Sammy Baloji co-founded in 2008 the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi.

His recent personal exhibitions include BeauxArts de Paris (2020); Sammy Baloji, Other Tales, Lund Konsthall and Aarhus Kunsthal (2020); Congo, Fragments d’une histoire, Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg (2019); A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes, Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2018); Sven Augustijnen & Sammy Baloji, Museumcultuur Strombeek (2018); Urban Now : City Life in Congo, Sammy Baloji and Filip de Boeck, The Power Plant, Toronto and WIELS, Brussels (2016-2017), and Hunting and Collecting, Mu. ZEE Kunstmuseum aan zee, Ostend (2014).

He has recently participated in the Sydney Biennial (2020), documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens, 2017), the Lyon Biennial (2015), the Venice Biennial (2015), the Photoquai Festival at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, 2015). His
works feature in many important public collections, including Tate Modern (London), MMK (Frankfurt/Main), Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Smithsonian (Washington D-C), Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (Paris), Museum Rietberg (Zürich), etc.

Introduction to the exhibition:

K(C)ongo Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues: Subversive Classifications is an exhibition conceived specifically for the Andito degli Angiolini as a new and extended chapter of Sammy Baloji’s ongoing reflection on and dialogue with a series of artefacts and archives dating back to the Kingdom of Kongo and that had arrived in Europe between the 16th and 17th centuries.

Central to the exhibition is a set of four oliphants –carved ivory war trumpets—, three of which are part of the collection of the Tesoro dei Granduchi at Palazzo Pitti, and one of which belongs to the Museo delle Civiltà di Roma. Intricately related to the history of 16th century Florence and that of Cosimo I de’ Medici, these impressive artefacts form the conceptual and aesthetical inspiration for Baloji’s project, paving the way for his complex artistic research that highlights the interlacing of historical moments and objects. Similarly, the Kongo textiles form another anchor point in this exhibition: they are coeval to the oliphants, arriving in Italy through Portuguese merchants and later sold to aristocratic connoisseurs. Baloji’s exhibition aims to excavate these pre-modern relationships and the horizontal exchanges between Africa and Europe that developed during and after this period, as evidenced by the letters from King Afonso I of Kongo to the Portuguese king Manuel I, also displayed here.

Marked with motifs inspired by those decorating the oliphants, The Crossing is an elaborate 88 meters long wool carpet that guides the visitor throughout these "interlaced dialogues" which form the basis of the exhibition. The copper and bronze wall-sculptures from the series Negative of Luxury Cloth and the weaving loom titled Goods Trades Roots are also marked by geometric patterns, recalling the precious raffia textiles that arrived in Italy through Portuguese merchants between the 16th and 17th centuries.

Inspired by Cosimo’s Hall of Geographical Maps at Palazzo Vecchio, the immersive installation Gnosis fur ther explores the concept of the Wunderkammer, of which many objects came from future colonies. Similarly, the sculptures displayed on the Uffizi storagerack were collected in the Congo while it was a Belgian colony, before being acquired by the Museo di antropologia e etnologia dell’Università di Firenze at the beginning of the 20th c., and later exhibited at the Scultura Negra exhibition of the XIII Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia in 1922. Baloji thereby contextualizes these Renaissance collections of mirabilia and naturalia and the emergence of modern anthropological and ethnographic museums in Italy. The classification systems of these museums revealed the exoticized and racialized perspective through which the African continent was presented in the age of empires as underlined by philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe in his seminal book The Invention of Africa (1988).

The exhibition highlights a "subversive" facet of the historical accounts around Kongo artefacts. In line with contemporary cultural perception and values, Baloji’s research goes beyond modern exoticizing and ethnographic classifications which can be considered as consequences of both the transatlantic slave trade and the Scramble for Africa of the late 19th century