Kasala - The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error

Sammy Baloji’s work creates new narratives through a re-shaping of archival and contemporary images, often reflecting upon colonial legacies that resonate through the present. For this project he re-imagines and draws upon two pre-colonial cultural forms, the kasala and lukasa, to critically approach the imposition of identities during the colonial era. Both are mnemotechnical devices (memory devices), used by the Luba peoples to whom the artist belongs. The kasala, a form of praise poetry often chanted, here becomes a fictional narrative realised in performance and sculptural form. This allows a blending of historical and contemporary facts with the artists own genealogy to consider the mythological and political ‘genesis’ of the Luba peoples and the filiations of family and social relations that did not correspond to colonial logics.