AFRICAN FILM INSTITUTE – CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA

Fault Lines: A Film program for Manger la terre / Eating the Soil, the 9th Edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale

21st of October at 6pm – Biasasa Art Center

23rd of October at 6pm – Picha Art Center 

7th of November at 6pm – Picha Art Center 

14th of November at 6pm – Institut Français (Halle de l’Etoile)

The African Film Institute is convening the film program of Manger la terre / Eating the Soil, the 9th Edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale. Organized by Picha, an independent, artist-led organisation founded in Lubumbashi in 2008, the Biennale is an important platform for contemporary art in the Democratic Republic of Congo and across the African continent. Under the artistic direction of Sorana Munsya, this year’s program positions the Biennale as a critical testing ground for artistic “indiscipline”—discovering alternative paths for existence, creativity, and transcendence from present-day global challenges.

The film program is conceived in relation to the figure and thought of V.Y. Mudimbe, and also in dialogue with the thematic framework of this edition of the Biennale, Manger la terre / Eating the Soil. A fault line is a break in the earth’s surface, and it is a visible part of a fracture or zone of fractures between two blocks of rock, allowing the blocks to move relative to each other. Ranging in length from a few millimeters to thousands of kilometers, this movement may occur rapidly, as a result of geological pressure like an earthquake, or may occur slowly, in the form of creep.

Mudimbe speaks of fault lines to further a project he started in The Invention of Africa (1988) and The Idea of Africa (1994): to explore the ordinariness of cultural lines; the picture of Africa in the global economy; and acknowledging the relation between cultural differences and the necessity of interaction and what they may signify.

Following Mudimbe, the film program includes feature and short films elaborating a set of precautions that modulate ways of bringing together complementary perspectives from a variety of disciplines, informed by an awareness of economic dynamics, regional realities, racial conditions, gendered violence, and popular knowledge productions, and ​​how to affirm the gift of life as universal and non-negotiable. The film program also features “screenings” by sound artists and musicians, imagining their audio contributions as sonic images.

All together, the film program explores the ordinariness of earth lines as figures determining spaces in the practice of everyday life to interrogations of what they suppose and impose in allegories; bringing us in dialogue or separate us in confrontation, by manners of social identities as well as the administration of complex systems, mental software and cultural programs.