AEQUARE. THE FUTURE THAT NEVER WAS

Sammy Baloji mixes commercials from the colonial era about agriculture and mining in his home country of Congo with contemporary film material. With AEQUARE. THE FUTURE THAT NEVER WAS, shown at the Biennale in Venice, the artist addresses the legacy of colonialism and the ecological destruction it has caused: the second largest rainforest in the world surrounding Yangambi (and also the Yangambi Science Centre) bear witness to a dissonance resulting from ‘acclimatisation, scientific control and territorial appropriation of Africa by Western colonists’.