10.08.2022

The Uninterrupted Song For the City

Woking note

Kinshasa, the city of Congolese cities, is thus a vast entity that is both fiercely centered on itself and largely turned outward. It is the heart of the compromise erected as a fertilizing principle. It is from there that things, goods, people, rhythms, words, sensitivities, minerals, songs start and it is there that everything will come back while continuing the process of transformation of oneself and the world. The compromise is positive and becomes ferment of renewal of the imaginary. This work, which is part of the Mémorial Improbable, a memorial fiction that the artist has been building for two years, revisits songs and scores produced according to the cultures and pre-colonial knowledge of the different regions of the Congo. Selected from the sound collection of the Africa Museum in Brussels, they are the traces of practices and performances that have almost disappeared, having not resisted the development of the cities, while some of them had been forbidden by the colonial authorities. They are then confronted, through an artificial intelligence, with the forms of music developed later, with the contact between the rhythms of slaves from Congo Square, in New Orleans, and composers of European classical music, Afro-American culture and contemporary urban cultures.

Sinzo Aanza

Vladimir Petrov

Huguette Tolinga

Vincent Glanzmann

Hiromi Gut

Vicko Tengwa

And an Artificial Intelligence