The visual artist and performer Christian Botale Molebo, born in Kinshasa (1980), studied visual communication in Kinshasa in 2006 and in 2012 graduated from the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. Throughout his performances he confronts, with the help of his father’s orally transmitted stories, the Belgian colonization of the Congo, the history of the Congo Free State and Zaire under Mobutu’s dictatorship. He sculpts his versions of “expatriated” African objects and positions them at the center of the performance, placing himself between memory and history while metaphorically gathering the legacy eradicated by the colonizers. Is it important that these objects continue to stay where they are? Are they well preserved? If these objects are not “expatriated,” are they still visible? Who decided to give them the status of works of art?

Author and film director: Christian Botale; co-creation: Victor Schmitt; designer of folkloric sound: Tangé Shongo; costume designer: Anne Deriviere; production: Les Ateliers Moyi Mwinda; co-Production: La Hear, Pole sud CDCN, La Drac and La Region du Grand’est Strasbourg, Live work vol. 6, Centrale fies, Saavy contemporary, Goethe Institut, Academie des Beaux Arts de Kinshasa.

Thank To my Father Botale Bolembo Louis and Pierre Mercier.