GROUND OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND is a project built in, around and through a range of different “space-time-states” that exist as both separate and conjoined entities – as blocks that can be assembled and disassembled at will. This polysemic installation is centered on a series of videos, still images, sound recordings and objects made in 2009-2010 in three places :
• Kinshasa, the capital of DRC ;
• The city of Mbandaka (Democratic Republic of Congo), located immediately beneath the GEO (a geosynchronous orbit directly above the Earth’s equator, which hosts thousands of communications satellites) ;
• And Mikili (meaning “worlds” in the Congo Lingala language), an imaginary interzone that represents the West for many Congolese and whose capital is Paris, the paradise for the kings of « sape », a fashion-based art that defines Mikili.
GROUND OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND is the psychic path that a man must travel to make his way to the nucleus of 21st century digital globalisation. Dreamspace itineraries, all leading to Mikili, a place, a state of being and a state of mind that many Congolese youth hope against all hope to reach, because there, they imagine, they will find solace (comfort, means, luxury).
In the world of GROUND OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND, hybrid identities rub up against and collide with one another in a postcolonial world traversed by robots and machines built by installation artist Bienvenu Nanga – and performances filmed by Eléonore Hellio and Dicoco Boketshu : peculiar, impossible, poetic works “starring” Boketshu, musician and artist Bebson Elemba (aka Bebson de la rue), Wemba (one of Congo’s most famous wrestlers), Antoine Mofilin¬ga and others. Objects, images and sounds appear and disappear, moving in and out of an afrofuturistic “machine”.

GROUND OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND VIDEO STILLS & TEXTS VIEWS

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