Exhibition on the Democratic Republic of the Congo at Quai Branly: discovering animist thought

Huge, ancient and diverse Africa.

With its area three times that of the United States.

With its 3000 cultural groups or different peoples having spoken up to a thousand distinct dialects ...

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At the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum, the new exhibition, as beautiful as it is profound and original, brings together a collection of some 163 masks, statuettes, and ancient ceremonial objects. It only focuses on the southwestern part of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But this area alone, just below the equatorial line, streaked by the rivers feeding the Kasai, a tributary of the great river, and which stretches to the Angolan plateau and its sources, is all the same roughly equivalent to half of France! There now live more than 28 million inhabitants because the agglomeration-capital of Kinshasa is included there. Formerly, in this basin naturally favorable to life, the human presence was infinitely less, but it was characterized by dozens of different cultures, albeit porous.

Material productions renowned in the West

Over time, trade and globalization have largely leveled them out.

Some groups, such as the Yaka (with their famous type of mask of a young, wide-eyed buffalo), the Suku, the Pende or the Tshokwe, which are well documented, have been extensively studied.

Their material productions have been known in the West for at least a century.

Very attended international exhibitions have even consecrated them, especially in these walls.

Curator of the present, Julien Volper, for example, signed in 2016, still at the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum,

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Moreover, we know less about the art of the Yanzi, the Buma, the Lyembe, the Sakata, the Mbala or the Kwese, of which Volper is here as much as possible the learned ferryman.

Little old records are available of them, if any at all.

Consequence: they have been almost forgotten by ethnologists.

A consistent selection of 163 objects

The great interest of this new route designed by Maud Martinot, thought out and designed by the one who is undoubtedly today the best connoisseur of Belgian ethnographic collections, is to apprehend these societies of the south-western Congolese as a whole. This is thanks to a consistent selection of 163 objects. With oral or danced stories, here is therefore, in the windows, the best and most eloquent of what we know in 2021 on this part of humanity. Because more than being the expression of a formal creativity which here seems inexhaustible, these artefacts impose themselves as the extremely rare receptacles of an animist history; this even if they date overwhelmingly from the time of Belgian colonization. Of course, we will speak of pieces of art - because they are fully works, virtuoso expressions of extremely refined know-how.

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But first and foremost, to those who take the time to observe them, they deliver a great deal of fascinating information.

Common iconographic and stylistic specificities or, on the contrary, specific to such and such a region, traces of ancient or disappeared rituals in which the masks passed for essential magical cores, principles of complex symbolism, logic of savage thought ... For all this, this n it's not too much to call them treasures.

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