Dark Filament

The below artwork is a submission by Jean Katambayi Mukendi for Design Indaba’s collaborative project with Google Arts & Culture titled colours of Africa. Africa is known for its bold, unapologetic use of colour. Stories are told in pigments, tones and hues; a kaleidoscope as diverse as the cultures and peoples of the continent. For Colours of Africa, we asked 60 African creatives from 54 African countries and territories to capture the unique spirit of their home in a particular shade. The projects they have created are personal and distinct stories of Africa, put into images, videos, texts and illustrations. Each artist has also attempted to articulate what being African means to their identity and view of the world. Explore the continent through the eyes of the inspired.

colour: Perception
Country: Democratic Republic of Congo
Artwork Rationale:

My drawings tend to be in black and white. If I could find a colour that represented perception, I would paint it onto my work. Colours are the markers of the visible world, they are the limits of our perceptions. If there were a new colour that could expand our perceptions, I would have chosen that. For my Colours of Africa submission I created a large-scale collage – the image of a lightbulb full of destroyed or burnt-out filaments, bulbs and pieces of electric waste. I want to show how our people in DRC still struggle, even though our land is rich in minerals. We mine copper, cobalt and now lithium to power batteries. Other people’s batteries. I grew up in a mining town and the contrast between life here and the life we enable elsewhere in the world has always struck me as strange. My collage is made up of darkened filaments, of powerlessness. If we are to develop as a nation, we need to expand our perceptions. We need a new colour.

What it Means to be African:

We have chosen to live with water, with electricity, with school, with classical political regimes, with town planning... but we do not know how to maintain them. We are escaping the challenge of globalisation, which allows the exchange of knowledge... While the human resource exists, the technology exists, the earth and the sun exist... What is this imaginary ingredient that is lacking to align consciousness and mentality? How to get out of this dichotomy, which puts well-being in conflict with well-doing. It is not clear when we will recover... Maybe we need a prayer. We let things run. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, I go out... Everyone for himself.
To be African:
To be African is to be patient
To be African is to resist
To be African is to conserve
To be African is to welcome
To be African is to smile To be African is to question
To be African is to project the future
To be African is to be contemporary

Biography:

Jean Katambayi Mukendi is an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He lives and works in the city of Lumbashi. In Katambayi’s visual work, memory, technology, logic, personal history and science come together. Cardboard is the base material for his sculptures, chosen because it is a perishable medium and a poor conductor for electricity. The sculptures are based on working drawings, with technical and associative links. They form the diaries of the sculptures and will probably last longer than the objects they detail. References to mathematics and electricity are a common thread throughout his notes. The sketches contain calculations, comments to himself (“à inventer: la colle conductrice”) and associations (“the working ant: works without getting tired”). Katambayi is always looking for the connections and stories to tell. Katambayi constructs and deconstructs perspectives: like the paradox of Congo, with its mineral wealth on the one hand and on the other, the reality of lightbulbs in Lubumbashi that do not have sufficient electricity to glow. Katambayi’s well-known Afrolamps sketches were shown for the first time in 2016 at Trampoline Gallery in Antwerp. These large format drawings have become a permanent part of his critical artistic practice. The light bulb is invented over and over again. The shape changes, mutates, the lamp becomes an abstraction. Of all the geometric figures, the circle dominates in these drawings. A glimpse of the different parts remains visible: the pressure discharge tube, the arbor, stem, filament supports, etc. Katambayi's work has been included in several galleries in Europe, including Trampoline in Antwerp and Waldburger Wouters in Brussels, Belgium.