ACT I KWANGA ARCHITECTURE

KWANGA ARCHITECTURE

/ ANTI-CAPITALIST TRANS ARCHITECTURE

IN DEVELOPMENT

Kwanga bars series 1_#2

Untitled_Social architectures and postcolonial monuments_2020

New works from the Kwanga series are now exhibited and for sale at Latitudes Art Fair 2020. Visit:

'Colonial statues and monuments did not serve primarily as aesthetic artifacts destined for the embellishment of towns or the living environment. From start to finish, they served as manifestations of the absolute arbitrariness of colonial power, whose foundations were already visible in the ways in which the wars of conquest and “pacification” were carried out, and armed uprisings quelled. They were expressions of the power of disguise, sculptural extensions of a form of racial terror. At the same time, they were the spectacular expression of the power of destruction and theft that animated the entire colonial project. But, above all, there is no domination without a cult of spirits—in this case, the dog-spirit, pig-spirit, the spirit of the riffraff that is so characteristic of all imperialism, past and present. The cult of spirits always requires a means of conjuring up the dead—a necromancy and a geomancy.'

(Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe)

"The principle that organic containers such as human bodies or other mobile structures within the Luba culture are seen as 'lieu de memoire' (a site of memory), completely clashes with the Western construction of history and memory. The past and often also anti-democratic ideologies and authoritarian leaders are glorified in the the West through monuments in a non-critical and static way. Fluid forms, however, hold the potential to break open static, oppressive architectures. Trauma can heal through monuments in motion, which enable a constant (re) positioning of identities.

Kwanga is a fluid material that can replace the static concrete and stone. KWANGA or "life" in Kikongo (a Congolese language) is the name I gave to the Afro-European rubber that I use in my work as a medium to materialize this vision of fluidity. "

(John K Cobra in REKTO VERSO magazine)

Kwanga works here on the molecular level of spacial reality. It reprograms spacial architecture to produce trans / fluid social architectures. The cult of living, of fluidity, is celebrated here.'

The Kwanga architecture-series represents the brief moments of solidity of social architecture in a ongoing process of fluid repositioning of identities. Certainty about identities and social architecture is always ephemerous, unstable and volatile.