Beads, Pixels, and Nkisi: Contemporary Kinois Art and Reconfigurations of the Virtual

Abstract

AbstractIn the 2016 Abiola Lecture, Mbembe argued that “the plasticity of digital forms speaks powerfully to the plasticity of African precolonial cultures and to ancient ways of working with representation and mediation, of folding reality.” In her commentary, Pype tries to understand what “speaking powerfully to” can mean. She first situates the Abiola Lecture within a wide range of exciting and ongoing scholarship that attempts to understand social transformations on the continent since the ubiquitous uptake of the mobile phone, and its most recent incarnation, the smartphone. She then analyzes the aesthetics of artistic projects by Alexandre Kyungu, Yves Sambu, and Hilaire Kuyangiko Balu, where wooden doors, tattoos, beads, saliva, and nails correlate with the Internet, pixels, and keys of keyboards and remote controls. Finally, Pype asks to whom the congruence between the aesthetics of a “precolonial” Congo and the digital speaks. In a society where “the past” is quickly demonized, though expats and the commercial and political elite pay thousands of dollars for the discussed art works, Pype argues that this congruence might be one more manifestation of capitalism’s cannibalization of a stereotypical image of “Africa.”