In his performances Eric Androa Mindre Kolo sees the body as a transmitter and receiver of emotions but also of events and conflicts that cross the world. His posture, his gestures as well as the accessories he makes, everyday objects diverted from their functions, contribute to making this way of perceiving sensitive. A poetics that questions the public space. His performances and installations challenge audiences with images as moving as they are funny. My main tool," he writes, "is my own body, which I stage according to what I perceive from those around me, with no other objective than to transcend appearances, to symbolically crystallize power relationships and tensions, to bring a form of poetry to them.
The deglagging of a world prey to wild capitalism, urbicide, uncompromising questioning of the public space, but also poetic questioning of the body in the city, imaginary futures, caustic humour: the performances offered by Éric Androa Mindre Kolo are so many proposals that both name disaster and oppose it to an end of no return.
During the first session of Dialogues Afriques at the end of 2019, Éric Androa Mindre Kolo performs Not afraid to die, which he presents as follows: "My body pays homage to the thousands of people who have had to leave their country and their families in search of life, peace, work and security. Some of them lost their lives during their journey. Someone who leaves and contemplates the possibility of failure may find the peril absurd and thus avoid it. But the one who leaves for survival, who considers that the life he has to lose is worthless, that one, his strength is unheard of because he is not afraid of death (Fatou Diome). This performance reflects certain moments of this journey, a real ordeal between life and death, pain and hope.
At the Théâtre du Tarmac, in April 2018, Éric Androa Mindre Kolo gives another performance. It is part of the Yif Menga project, directed by Dominique Malaquais and Julie Peghini, in which Éric Androa Mindre Kolo is a key player. A meeting between artists and researchers of different generations and disciplines, the project favours the meeting of fields of knowledge and practices around the major social, political and aesthetic stakes that performance art in Africa represents today.
In December 2017 and January 2018, a collective of Christian intellectuals organizes peaceful marches against the maintenance of Joseph Kabila in power. These are violently repressed. The Catholic Church is in the front line. The performance of Eric Androa Mindre Kolo at the Tarmac is inspired by these events and takes its own position: a radical refusal of submission, of despair. Beating a breach in the dictatorship here takes the form of a Way of the Cross, at once painful, poetic and sardonic.