Watch Maliq Simone and his colleagues and talk about "Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo鈥檚 Urban Worlds" by Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji.
鈥樷 is a vivid image for the kind of attentive, careful but also painful practices which bring a city into existence. It is a specific place of urban becoming, and a particular collaboration from which this urban anthropological photo-book stems: Filip de Boeck has researched Congo鈥檚 urban worlds and especially Kinshasa for several decades and repeatedly collaborated with photographers. Sammy Baloji has worked with de Boeck as a photographer on various projects over the years, and his art encompasses other media, such as film and sculpture, extending far beyond the urban as an object. What are the acts of 鈥渟uturing the city鈥 that de Boeck and Baloji explore with this acute composition of text and photography? And do these acts have a specific temporality?
Alert to anything that might be on 鈥渟tandby鈥, or that articulates the city as a 鈥減romissory assemblage鈥, Maliq, Laura and Alexa looked for scenes in the book where the provisonality yet resoluteness of suturing resonates with the dis-engagement of standing by, and the looseness of urban promises, whether it be ever-at-the-ready pharmacies, watching over potholes, or vigilantly enduring authority over the land.
Watch it here: