Antje Van Wichelen is a Brussels-based visual artist who loves community-based collaborations. She is a member of LABO BxL and of the Troubled Archives collective, supported by nadine vzw.

Over the past year and a half, she has been an artist-in-residence at Brussels belongs to us (BNA-BBOT), and has presented work at Beursschouwburg, Brass, and Bozar, in collaboration with the choir of under-documented women Les Invisibles, soprano Claron Mc Fadden, and some of Brussels’ activists. In 2027, she will contribute to an exhibition at Kanal with Troubled Archives. Former exhibitions took place at Nova Cinema (2023), the Dakar Biennal (2022), Fondazione Re Rebaudengo (2020), and the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (2019).

Her main medium is experimental 16mm film, through which she explores ecological solutions and collaborations with local conditions—for example, developing film in the toxic water of Lubumbashi. She usually presents these film experiments in installations engaged in collaborations that invite the public to be active.

Over the past fifteen years, Antje Van Wichelen’s artistic research has focused primarily on representing colonized human beings. She seeks to translate this research into artistic work that opens up a positive, future-oriented questioning involving speculative ideas.

 In this context, Congolese filmmaker Fundi Mwamba Gustave invited her in 2019 to collaborate on the project UBATIZO (The Baptism).

Born in Lubumbashi, Gustave Fundi Mwamba, also known as FM, is a Congolese filmmaker, visual artist, and cultural organizer whose work explores genre cinema (horror, science fiction, fantasy), the visual arts, and industrial heritage. He began his career in theater and modeling before joining the VICANOS Club collective in 2009 and directing his first short film, Mampocha, in 2010. Trained at the Halle de l’Étoile and a graduate of the University of Lubumbashi (UNILU), he co-founded O2 Studios with Glodie Mubikay in 2012.

His 2016 meeting with Belgian artist Lucile Desamory led to the experimental feature film Télé-Réalité, which premiered at the Berlinale (Forum Expanded) in 2020.

His visual art gained international recognition through the UBATIZO project, a visceral reimagining of a work begun in 2015 with UNILU students. It continued during the “De/Recomposing the Colonial Gaze” workshop in 2018. Launched in 2019 in Lubumbashi with Belgian artist Antje Van Wichelen, this collaboration deepened at the Picha Workshops (2021) and then at the Lubumbashi Biennale (2022). Combining digital media, 16mm film, archival footage, and infrared imagery, this experimental horror short film was presented at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India) and the Kunsthalle Mainz (Germany) before its final shoot, which was co-directed with Antje Van Wichelen and co-produced by Twenty Nine Studio & Production and ErickeyLan Global.

A key figure in the local cultural scene, he has directed the Biasasa Art Center in Katuba since 2022. He also founded the Paradox Film Festival and its training program, the Paradox Film Lab—the first platform in the DRC dedicated to genre cinema and digital arts. He is currently developing the fantasy thriller NKISHI with Lucile Desamory and Glodie Mubikay, as well as the art-science-society project NJIA YA KATUBA.