The World Around & Future Observatory at the Design Museum present IN FOCUS:RESEARCH.
“The context is really what drives me to gather both archives, interviews or even collaborate with scientists, anthropologists or ethnographers,” Sammy Baloji said on his ever-expanding, cross-disciplinary artistic practice in conversation with The World Around for In Focus: Research.

Baloji grew up in Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: a city in the mineral-rich Katanga Province, built on industrial mining in the projects of its Belgian colonisers. Tracing the Congolese histories obscured or mis-documented through imperial expansion and post-colonial nation-writing, Baloji meditates on the role of archival research in his work. “What I discover with the archive,” he explains, “is not only the colonial history, but this relation between the subject who’s photographed and the one who's taking photographs.”

As a practice brought to the Congo during the colonial expeditions, when cameras were instrumentalized to produce an ‘objective’ image of ‘the indigenous,’ Baloji narrates how this tension has been carried in the medium. Having started his career as a photographer, it also presents the open-ended question that directs his research: “how can I use the same medium and create a language different to the colonial one, because I'm using the same tools?”

Reclaiming the resources exploited during Belgian colonisation to construct a new “context of expression,” across his practice, Baloji unearths the past to represent the reverberations of imperial era extraction and construction in the present, asking what societies we want to see reflected in our archives when we revisit them in the future.

Watch the interview and other presentations from In Focus: Research, co-presented with Future Observatory at @designmuseum, on The World Around YouTube channel.

Program for the full event available to download at https://theworldaround.com/program/

This interview has been edited and was part of In Focus: Research, presented by The World Around and Future Observatory at the Design Museum in London on Saturday, March 16, 2024. The event was hosted in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) — part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) — and The World Around Global Cultural Partner Fondation Cartier

To find out more about The World Around's programming or to get in touch, visit https://www.theworldaround.com

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