Since 1972, the Festival d'Automne à Paris accompanies artists by producing and diffusing their works, in a spirit of fidélité, openness and discovery thanks to a multidisciplinary program: theater, music, dance, visual arts, cinema. Each year, from September to December, it offers nearly 50 events and brings together around 250,000 spectators.
A major figure on the African art scene, multi-rewarded for his work on colonial history and its contemporary traces, Sammy Baloji explores in a renewed way the memories built between Africa, the Americas and Europe, and their transmission.
After Documenta 14, the biennials of Venice, Lyon and Sydney, Sammy Baloji was invited by the Festival aux Beaux-Arts de Paris for his first solo exhibition in a Parisian institution. Around several installations and films, he approaches the question of transmission and genealogy through the Congolese rumba, the tradition of the kasala and the so-called "Indian" hangings of the Manufacture des Gobelins. Based on Hans Himmelheber's collection of photographs and objects and a performance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, the video Kasala: The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende's Error links contemporary mining and extensive collection of objects from the colonial era by re-actualizing the practice of kasala.
This performative narrative serves to perpetuate the name of the elders and celebrate the Other among the Lubas of Kasai. In addition, like the kasala, we find in the Congolese rumba the practice of dedication. Filmed with David N. Bernatchez and Kiripi Katembo Siku in Kinshasa, the documentary Rumba Rules. Nouvelles Généalogies reveals the daily life of young people who perpetuate and reinvent a music born, under colonization, from the meeting of Afro-Cuban rhythms and Congolese sounds. A history that is written between Africa, the Americas and Europe.
Sammy Baloji (Congo) is in residency at the Cité internationale des arts through a partnership with the Festival d'Automne in Paris.