Venice Biennale

The 1931 rape of Kafuchi – a Pende noble woman – sparked off the Pende peoples’ revolt against enforced recruitment, in which they decapitated and dismembered Maximilien Balot, a colonial administrator for the Belgian government. The Belgian army’s reprisal was swift and violent. Carved the same year as Maximilien Balot’s death, the ancestral sculpture representing the Belgian Colonial Officer was created. The sculpture was intended as a power object to harness Maximilian Balot’s angry spirit in service of the Pende people. It remained hidden until 1972, when it was sold to an American scholar who later sold it to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, Virginia.

For the Biennale Arte 2024, CATPC has petitioned the VMFA for a temporary loan that was recently approved by the museum. It is their wish that the ancestral sculpture Balot travels to Lusanga so the community can physically and historically reconnect with the sculpture and express “a shared heritage for all humanity that traverses the world.” Balot is exhibited in the White Cube, Lusanga where it will be ritually returned to its rightful place among the region’s notables, traditional chiefs, current and former plantation workers, children, women, men and animals. Visitors to the Dutch Pavilion in Venice can see the sculpture on display via a live stream.

Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) is a collective and community from Lusanga (DRC). Lusanga is the site of Anglo-Dutch company Unilever’s very first plantation. Today, the lands and ecosystems surrounding Lusanga –once rich rainforests– are depleted soils no longer capable of sustaining the communities that live from them.

In 2017, CATPC and Renzo Martens opened the White Cube, a museum, in Lusanga. They also built a school, conference hall, kitchen and a gathering place for the community. It is here that the CATPC members create the artworks that they have exhibited in leading museums and institutions internationally. With the proceeds from their art, they have already bought back 200 hectares of former plantation lands and are currently transforming them into biodiverse agro-forests. For CATPC, the time has come for plantation workers to reclaim the land and the profits extracted from plantations and invested in museums, as theirs.

CATPC includes the artists Djonga Bismar, Alphonse Bukumba, Irène Kanga, Muyaka Kapasa, Matthieu Kasiama, Jean Kawata, Huguette Kilembi, Mbuku Kimpala, Athanas Kindendi, Anti Leba, Charles Leba, Philomène Lembusa, Richard Leta, Jérémie Mabiala, Plamedi Makongote, Blaise Mandefu, Daniel Manenga, Mira Meya, Emery Muhamba, Tantine Mukundu, Olele Mulela, Daniel Muvunzi, Alvers Tamasala, Ced’art Tamasala. CATPC is presided by René Ngongo.

The Mondriaan Fund has invited Dutch artist Renzo Martens and Dutch-Moroccan curator Hicham Khalidi, to work and think together on a proposal for the Biennale Arte’s 2024 Dutch pavilion. This opportunity was premised, in part, on Martens’ long and sustained work with CATPC from its inception. Martens and Khalidi have sought to find a way in which CATPC can represent itself at the Dutch pavilion in Venice.

For Martens, one of the reasons it is important that they take center stage, is that communities like CATPC have provided the profits on which many Western museums and cultural institutions have been built in the first place. Martens: ‘It is time we listen and learn from their art.’

In parallel, CATPC has come to the conclusion that the moment has arrived for them to part ways from their earlier ways of working. After long deliberation, members of the collective, along with Martens and Khalidi, have decided that CATPC’s project for self-determination cannot be realised without autonomy from Martens’ original vision.

Martens has therefore elected to act in service of the collective, while Khalidi proposes to mediate this transformation. Together, they hope to support CATPC’s aim to articulate a forceful critique of the art world’s often unwitting participation in the plantation regime that has devastated—and continues to devastate—the indigenous peoples and communities of the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond.
Martens and Khalidi aim to help accommodate CATPC’s concepts and approaches toward the sacred within art and agroforestry to inaugurate a new era of the post-plantation. Above all, they hope to advance CATPC’s struggle to recuperate its cultural past, to claim its place in current debates, about the capacity of western art institutions to be sites of accountability, repair, or healing, and to restore its sacred lands so as to live and thrive as a community.

The Mondriaan Fund, the public incentive fund for visual arts and cultural heritage, is responsible for the Dutch entry at the International Art Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia. The presentation is funded from the international budget the Mondriaan Fund receives from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.

To arrive at a good choice for a submission, a special advisory committee was set up and asked to assess five different proposals. Among other things, the advisory committee considered the quality of the plan, the impact it will have on the international stage of the Venice Biennale and whether the plan will result in a new interpretation of the Rietveld Pavilion and the Dutch entry for the Venice Biennale. The committee members for the 2024 Dutch entry were: Raul Balai (visual artist & curator), Hendrik Folkerts (curator of contemporary art and head of exhibitions Moderna Museet), Fransizka Nori (director Frankfurter Kunstverein), Suzanne Swarts (director of Museum Voorlinden) and Fatos Üstek (curator & writer). Eelco van der Lingen (director of the Mondriaan Fund) was chairman.

Eelco van der Lingen, director of the Mondriaan Fund and commissioner: ‘We are delighted that this presentation will soon be exhibited in both Venice and Lusanga on behalf of the Netherlands. It will allow everyone to witness the next step of CATPC and Martens’ work. The issue of colonial relations, which also affects Martens’ work, is indisputable. Together with CATPC members, Khalidi and Martens will explore how we, without denying this issue, can work towards a better understanding and a new future. Restitution will be a major theme of the presentation. This is a topical issue within the global heritage sector and within a broader debate about coloniality. It is essential to have a conversation about this and I am happy that we can contribute to it on a big stage.’