Colonial Reenactment? Questioning Renzo Martens’s Empowerment project through the arts in DR Congo

Abstract

In this thesis, I analyze Renzo Martens’s artistic project taking place in the former plantation of Lusanga, DR Congo. With his Institute for Human Activities (IHA), Martens founded the local community of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (CATPC) and he facilitates an artistic project focused on material empowerment. All together, they seek to fight global inequalities by experimenting an alternative economic program. Martens aims to redistribute the surplus capital from the contemporary art world and enable the development of Lusanga. I argue that Martens’s project is mostly a colonial reenactment presented to his Western audience in order to show the limits of our current model of emancipatory programs and to shed light on the global neo-colonial economy. Martens’s project can be a starting point for a reflection on more equal cultural and economic relations, between the global North and South.