No Congo No Technologies
In September 2017, China announces the ban on marketing gasoline vehicles by 2030–2040 and declares open the era of the electric car. “You can ride for free forever, thanks to the sun rays” Elon Musk promised already in 2013. But talk about the ecological virtues of electric cars mask new challenges, those related to ores and rare metals that enter into its production. They are thirty in number and their exploitation is subject to increased speculation. In addition, their extraction, refining, as well as recycling of batteries, are very polluting processes. The promise of the green car of the future is therefore valid only for the part of the world that will enjoy its use, the environmental impact being displaced in the areas of extraction and refining of materials that compose it. Through his project Grey and Green Speculation on the Accident and the Oxidant developed in the context of the Hivos residence, Digital Earth, Jean Katambayi Mukendi questions precisely the contradictions that this green revolution raises, when, at the end of the year 2018, an Australian operating company, AVZ Minerals, announces the discovery of a lithium, cassiterite and coltan stockpile at the Manono deposit in Tanganyika Province, Democratic Republic of Congo. For the record, lithium is used in the manufacture of rechargeable batteries or high-voltage batteries, cassiterite (tin ore) is used for soldering electronic components and coltan (for colombo-tantalite) is a mixed metal ore of tantalum and niobium which makes it possible to obtain the famous tantalum essential for the manufacture of capacitors and surface wave filters used especially in mobile phones. This discovery and the mining project would make Manono, the world’s largest mining and industrial lithium production basin.
Charging Tesla Crash © Uriel Orlow
The Grey and Green Speculation About Accidents and the Oxidant study involves research, as well as critical and speculative design, community design and performance. The central element of the project was the construction of a replica made of copper and recycled iron wires to the scale 1 of a Tesla, the most publicised symbol of the electric car of the future.
The choice of copper refers to the story of Lubumbashi, the birthplace of the artist and specifically refers to the miniature objects that children of mine workers made to serve as toys. Built in 1910, Élisabethville, which became Lubumbashi in 1965, is an industrial city in the Katanga province built to meet the needs of the Miners Union of Upper Katanga (M.U. U.K) Belgium, which became Gécamines a few years after Independence. Its main activity is the extraction of copper, cobalt, zinc and uranium. It is uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine that would be used to make the first atomic bomb. The city simultaneously symbolises the violence of Belgian colonial exploitation, the attempts at national management in the post-independence years and the reduction to poverty of “the children of copper” at the end of the 1990s (Bana Shaba).
Tesla Crash was manufactured under the direction of Daddy Tshykaya, Technical Design and Construction Manager, and resulted in many exchanges, proposals and views. Reproduced using images gleaned from the internet with a car base recovered from a Jaguar MARK II, mounted in the opposite direction, the Tesla made in Lubumbashi is a strange object. Car-sculpture, life-size toy, prototype, it is shaking up the categories and codes of the representation of contemporary art.
The praise of collective intelligence
"People spend their time fighting to control the basics. This Congolese situation of contrast between potential wealth and low level of income of the population is the subject of continual speculative reflections between artists and peoples who express themselves through various approaches, like that which compares the defence of clean energies to the methods of management of these energies and the mood of the donors for the promotion of clean energies," Jean Katambayi.
The Grey and Green Speculation About Accidents the Oxidant study is also carried out by the Brussels artists collective Enough Room for Space and is part of On-Trade-Off**, a vast project of critical productions on the stakes of mining resources and the perverse effects of the mining industry. Designed as a interdisciplinary platform initiated by Picha (Lubumbashi, DRC) and Enough room for space, On-Trade-Off brings together artists, researchers and producers with the ambition of designing and promoting artistic production methods in networks that are more sustainable and supportive.
Jean Katambayi also used the time of manufacture of the Tesla to organise many presentations and meetings in the frame of the Popular University. Lawyers, trade unionists, automotive experts, art school students, but also street people — “local experts” — with their vernacular and popular knowledge, were involved in the process of reflection on the future of the region in the perspective of exploitation of lithium deposits. These spaces of debates made possible the approach to questions which concern the artist: knowing that the quotation on the stock exchange of the precious ores is done on refined products and thus does not concern anymore the DRC, what is the nature of the resources to be mobilised to the era of the car of the future: intelligence or “grey matter” or mineral resources? If the future of the electric car lies largely in the DRC, lies the future of Congo in the Tesla? Why the exploitation of resources such as copper, cobalt, coltan has not allowed the country to develop its own infrastructure, leaving foreign companies the monopoly on exploitation of its own resources? When will the Congolese ride in the famous electric cars?
Tesla Crash © Alain Nsenga
A performance as exorcism?
"We are now at a time of unbalanced trade between the South and the North. The former offer materials and labor against the later who offer technologies and intelligence. At the end of the construction of the TESLA car in wire at scale 1, we will perform a physical simulation of an accident to express the enrichment of world mineral industry against a local economy still static and poor (in the country where the minerals are extracted). This is when the project becomes speculative and digital. The whole concept of my research will be the speculation around the accident," Jean Katambayi.
The final stage of Jean Katambyi’s project consisted in the simulation of an accident***. One could see in this performance the symbol of a poetic, political and metaphorical attempt to break the infernal relationship that binds the Congo, supplier of raw materials, to the West, producer of haunting technologies that awake desire but which in fact only enslave the poorest part of the population that provides the labor of the mines.
Author of Postcolonial Imperialism, Criticism of the Dazzling Society, Gabonese sociologist Joseph Tonda returns to an urban legend dating back to the 1920s in Kinshasa, according to which the headlights of a car could turn people into pigs. Tonda interprets this legend as a metaphor for the capacity of the colonial machine represented by the car to exert a blinding and petrifying fascination on those who look at it, as well as the Congolese imagination’s ability to account for the violence of the colonial experience. It traces this power relationship to the Age of Enlightenment, which would promote humanist philosophy, knowledge and science, while externally organising the field of civilisation of the colonised.
Could we see in this artistic project the destruction of the object of desire as a ceremony that aims to break the infernal circle of predation and blinding? For in fact, the invention of the Tesla and the futuristic storytelling that goes with it, would not it be a new episode of a techno-scientific capitalist culture that proceeds to the monopolising of resources and the maintenance of the Congolese in a subordinate position while building the mythology of progress and well-being that goes with it?
Footnotes:
*The title, No Congo, No technologies, is borrowed from the South African magazine Chimurenga (October 2017 in Chronic)
**On-Trade-Off were invited and showcased a miniature version of Tesla at Contour Bienalle 9 'Coltan as Cotton', curated by Nataša Petrešin Bachelez in 2019
***The performance ‘Charging Tesla Crash: a Speculation’ is a collaboration between Jean Katambayi, Sammy Baloji, Daddy Tshikaya and Marjolijn Dijkman, who constructed the Tesla Coil. It took place during the 6th edition of the Biennale de Lubumbashi, Future Genealogies, Tales From The Equatorial Line (October 24–November 24, 2019).