ANTWERP.- Tommy Simoens announced that artist and composer David Shongo has been awarded the Main Prize State of the ART(ist) at Ars Electronica 2025. His new installation Café Kuba will be on view at the Ars Electronica Festival from 3 to 7 September, in the exhibition PANIC yes/no at Postcity, the festival’s central venue in Linz.

The prestigious State of the ART(ist) prize honors artists who face threats to their existence, whether through political repression, war, environmental disaster, or economic precarity. It recognizes practices that persist despite adverse conditions and celebrates voices that bring global urgencies into focus through art. In awarding the prize to Shongo, the jury emphasized the precision, conceptual clarity, and courageous engagement of his project.

Later this year, Café Kuba will travel on to DOK Leipzig 2025, the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, which runs from 27 October to 2 November. The work has been selected for the International Competition Documentary Film 2025, placing it among the key works shaping the festival’s discourse on contemporary cinema and its capacity to address the world’s most pressing conflicts.

At the same time, Shongo is preparing his participation in the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) Residencies, one of Asia’s most comprehensive international residency programs for interdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practices. For this residency, he will extend his ongoing exploration of silence in relation to memory and social inequality, conducting research into the Battle of Singapore in 1942 and its historical connections to the Congo under Belgian colonial rule. Drawing on oral histories and archival materials, Shongo will further develop his cross-cultural inquiry into trauma, resilience, and the politics of remembrance.

Café Kuba itself is a cinematic installation combining moving image and soundscapes. At its center is a mobile coffee cart, a familiar presence on the streets of Kinshasa, which Shongo has repurposed into a discreet recording tool. In doing so, he transforms an everyday object into a cinematic device of listening and observation, able to move unnoticed through the city and capture its fragile political and social choreography.

The film was shot in Kinshasa just before the anticipated assault on the capital following the M23 rebel group’s capture of Goma in February 2025. Against this backdrop of renewed violence, Shongo documents the emotional landscape of the city, where daily conversations are carried out under the shadow of war. The work resonates with Congo’s long and turbulent history — assassinations, coups, wars, looting — and with the enduring instability that continues to shape the lives of its residents.

In addition to its documentary dimension, Café Kuba incorporates fictional elements inspired by Kinshasa’s popular culture. Shongo introduces the spectral image of the Mercedes 2027 buses, nicknamed “Spirit of Death”, as a symbol of the violence unfolding in the East. Alongside them appear three mystical masked figures holding fragments of electronic waste and car license plates — a poetic trilogy pointing to the true roots of Congo’s war: the global competition over strategic minerals essential for technological progress and ecological transition.

Through this hybrid approach, Café Kuba opens a sensory space where memory, history, and contemporary conflict converge. The cart itself becomes the protagonist of the film, not only recording but also activating the city. Its trajectories produce a drifting archive of urban movement, voices, rhythms, and silences, drawing attention to what usually remains unnoticed or unheard. The work transforms simple acts of observation into an urgent form of political resistance.

As Shongo explains in his artist statement, the project is inseparable from the unstable conditions in which he lives and works: “My personal and professional life is directly and increasingly affected by Congo’s unstable political and social climate. The ongoing conflict in Eastern Congo has created a national atmosphere of insecurity and psychological trauma that resonates throughout the country, including in Kinshasa, where I reside.” In this context, the act of making a film becomes at once an artistic practice and an existential stance.

The Ars Electronica jury underlined this in their statement: “Against the backdrop of war, colonial aftershocks, and economic exploitation, Shongo invents a ‘fugitive cinema’ — a practice of radical listening forged in movement, concealment, and survival. In a moment when visibility is dangerous and silence is imposed, this work dares to listen.”For the jury, Café Kuba is both a poetic and political gesture, mapping Kinshasa as a body marked by trauma and resistance, while also pointing toward the unfinished struggle for justice in Congo and beyond.

Finally, as the Ars Electronica press release notes, Shongo’s project offers viewers not only an immersive cinematic experience but also a vital form of testimony: “The central starting point is Café Kuba — a converted coffee cart from the streets of Kinshasa, which David Shongo has transformed into a mobile recording device to capture the sounds, voices, and social fabric of the city along its route. This immersive approach creates a sensory archive of resistance — one that understands listening as a political practice.”

With Café Kuba, David Shongo contributes a singular voice to contemporary art and cinema, crafting a work of both poetic beauty and political urgency. His practice demonstrates how art, even in times of collapse, can invent new ways of listening, remembering, and resisting.