The young director’s experiments seek to go beyond any limits by adapting scenes of horror for video. Ubatizo, la genèse du mal (Ubatizo — which means “baptism” in Swahili — the Origin of Evil, 2018) takes as its starting point a fictional story inspired by real events as a means to condemn the irresponsible and far from pragmatic exploitation of mineral resources. Here, FM puts himself on screen—denouncing the messy exploitation of minerals, which, according to him, plunges the village of Bofwa into “monstrification”—to talk about the congenital disabilities that follow on from what he calls the “desecration of the village’s sacred river.” The images of people with deformities shown in the video are shocking. They call into question the practices that are destroying human life. And this is a sizable problem in a country like his that is generally agreed to be a “geological scandal.”
Whatever idea might have been the starting point for producing this work, it is clear that experimenting with artistic practices can be a revelation, showcasing talent and gearing it to new ways of telling stories. Whether moving or static, the shots in this work give it a depth, a dynamism, an energy that packs itself into a “choreography” in order to merge into the settings, through the spoken or mimed texts. A witness to the power that new technologies have to revolutionize the contemporary practice of art.
[1] Remarks recorded by the author during an interview conducted with the artist on May 22, 2018.
Costa Tshinzam is a writer, blogger, and author who is a member of the Habari RDC community. He took part in the C& critical writing workshop generously funded by the Ford Foundation in Lubumbashi, where he lives and works.