Po B. K. Lomami

After I lost three matriarchs in quick succession in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo—without the possibility of returning to visit and mourn—lineage became materially and immaterially unstable. These works mark an attempt to maintain ties, revealing the unspeakable threat and realization of loss. After so many separations, disappearances, and relocations, what remains? What will protect the future from forgetting? This space tests an uncertain legitimacy, threatened by shame and fear of failure. Here, compartmentalization protects against psychic implosion; it partitions memory, allowing for continuity, while holding fracture.

The poem in the artwork À la mémoire was originally published in the magazine estuaire, volume 190 "Adelphes", October 2023. More information here.

There is no precise, daily accounting of the number and names of people murdered, raped, tortured, trafficked, displaced, and disappeared in the ongoing genocide of millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are no exact figures for the quantity of extracted minerals, no record of the scale of enslavement, and no account of the profits accumulated through their circulation. Instead, there are rounded-off estimations, forecasts, extrapolations, incomplete censuses, redacted reports, and countless individual testimonies that cannot be aggregated. How can we compute atrocities of this scale? 

One regular source of accurate data from the region, however, is the weather: temperature, precipitation, wind, atmospheric pressure. Weather is the subject of everyday small talk in the West. If we can’t talk about what is happening, perhaps we can discuss the weather under which it unfolds. As I arrange sharded memories, timelines fracture, explanations are withheld. These stories resist interpretation; they refuse simplification into a consumable narrative, like a shield against extractive curiosity. Gaps and repetitions contain what is too painful, too dangerous, too numerous to resolve. Thick with erasure, they hold the atmosphere of the genocost. 

Genocide and ecocide are not aberrations of progress but its hidden infrastructure. What is celebrated in the Global North as progress is inseparable from violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is the dark underside of modernity: a teleology that names accumulation as development while distributing death elsewhere. To speak of genocost is not simply to name this atrocity, but to confront the economic logic that sustains and subsidizes progress, and to demand its reimagining through solidarities that refuse to normalize the sacrifice of Congolese lives and lands. 

How long will this take? A forever delay without horizon or end. Western time presents itself as solution—more time, always more time—while the present remains saturated with harm. Extractive capitalism renders communities expendable, positioning people as endangered within their own lands. A racist logic of extinction is embedded in global supply chains. Violence operates infrastructurally: through the distribution of exposure to death and precarity, the partitioning of populations into zones of value and sacrifice where some lives are deemed structurally ungrievable. Grief is delayed, contained, edited, polished, put away.

This infrastructure is also psychological. It demands composure, gratitude, assimilation, legibility, even while carrying intergenerational rupture. Fragmentation emerges as both condition and strategy: a splitting between memory and adaptation. Here, rage names both infrastructure and what it conceals; madness resists the normalization of violence; external sanity is both required performance and necessary cover. The diasporic bodymind is dialectically suspended between psychic implosion and ethical anesthesia. Compartmentalization protects the psyche from collapse. At the same time, it mirrors the structural fragmentation imposed by extractive and genocidal systems. How do we move from compartmentalization as bare survival toward a relational architecture where fragments can speak to each other without destroying the self? 

Compartmental’s arranged spaces trace a condition of suspended belonging. I inhabit an in-between space: geographically distant from the violence yet psychically entangled with it. I carry the aftershocks. I hold what remains but cannot fully reproduce. Soft like an endling. The last of a line, the figure of the endling occupies a charged threshold: at once the final link to one world and the first fragile link in another. Behind sealed surfaces, passing for sanity, density accumulates. What appears as nothing holds surplus—grief deferred, memory held in suspension. In this infrastructural space, what reads as inaction is a form of endurance with delayed, slowly released effects.

(0:00 - 2:13)

Sendy-Loo Emanuelle: Hi, Po.

Po B. K. Lomami: Hi.

SLE: So today we have 4 installations that you've created that we're going to talk about today. So let's start with the first piece.

PBKL: Yes.

SLE: So tell me about the name of the piece and also how it came about for you to create this piece.

PBKL: Yes. So this piece is called À La Memoire. And first, it's a print. It's a print of a small, small photo that I have from my mom. It's like the size of an ID photo. And it's one of the few last photos that my mom took of herself. I mean, it was done, a portrait of her before she left Congo to go to Belgium. And so that photo was starting to get damaged, I scanned it, and then blow it on a very big film. So it's printed on film. And it is transparent so we can see light come through it. And on the top of it, there's a poem that I wrote during a residency in the Place Léopold-Sédar-Senghor in Montreal, next to the University of Montreal, and during a residency with "La poésie partout" and this text, this poem is really about the absence, in particular the absence of the matriarchs in my family, the absence because of distance and distance in time and distance in space, but also because they passed away one after another in a short period of time. So it's an homage to them.

(2:13 - 6:57)

SLE: We can see also three images of three women that is very, very light. we almost cannot see them. Can you tell a bit more about this piece?

PBKL: So these are the matriarchs I was talking about. They are my maternal grandmother, my aunt, the big sister of my mother, so the eldest in her family. And then my grandmother on my father's side. And the same way they are printed on film, but I wanted to play with this idea of being present and being absent at the same time. So depending on how we place our body in the space, the image became more clear or more blurry. From a certain distance, it's totally gray. And when we come in front or move around, it becomes more clear and we can see the shapes and the contrast. That allows us to see them. So this is also the idea with intimacy, because it's intimate pictures for me, and how to show this grief that you have for people that you didn't grow up with, that you didn't have a day-to-day relationship, sometimes not even communication anymore, but still having an impact on your life by their presence, existence, and also the action in the past, informing the action that other members of the family do today. So it's a way to have them in the space without envying a sense of voyeurism towards them.

SLE: And we see in between these pieces, there is an image of you wrapped in some type of fabric foil with different lights. Can you explain what was the concept behind this image?

PBKL: Yeah, so initially, I am a performance artist. But coming in academia, I couldn't perform the way I used to perform. So I moved towards other mediums and see what they can do in terms of performance, in relation to performance, even if it's different. And in this photo, I was working in a series called Endling, and I was interested in what the image does in comparison or in relationship dialogue with the performance. And I was thinking about the archive. What's the archival performance? What's the documentation of performance? And I wanted to have something that still talk about the performance with that being the performance itself. And I revisited different acts of my performances dealing with grief and trying to restage them based on the memory, the sensation, the dialogue, the collective experience that those performances created.

And so in this photo, I stand wrapped in aluminum foil which is an act that I do in this performance called aksanti 33 Part One. And I have this huge stick, like wooden stick that is actually a spatula, a wooden spatula, also covered in foil. And this is a spatula that I carved for this performance because in my memory, my mom had a spatula with which she was cooking fufu, which is a dish. And it was a big spatula. And my memory as a little, little child is a spatula was my size. My mother still had this spatula. And this spatula, actually, my grandmother, her mother, gave it to her right before she left Congo. So it's something that was passed down and she arrived in Belgium with it and she still has it today.

And from this memory as a childhood, I carved this spatula with my adult size. So it was still my size as in my memory, thinking about how to archive sensation and experience. And I cook with that gigantic spatula, a dish that my mom used to do to me and my grandmother used to do for her children. And then I never did myself because why would I do this? My mom does it better.

(6:57 - 8:38)

PBKL: And so I'm wearing this aluminum foil, hiding myself because I'm in grief and also I don't want to be exposed, and I'm having this spatula that serves me almost like as a help to walk with the weight of the pain. And I'm wearing a mask that is in plastic and transparent and the mask is actually my own face. So I'm wearing my own face, a face in a natural state that's hiding the face in pain behind, wearing my own face and having in a coif, a head wrap, also in aluminium foil. And I'm like standing on the sea of transparent plastic that looks like actually a body of water. And I'm surrounded by three massive lights, spotlights for stage, and those lights are representing the presence of the three matriarchs.

SLE: Thank you. So now we move to the other section. So we can hear your voice, and there's actually 3 components that I see in the space here. One, the first one that we are going to talk about is the screen where there's different images, videos of different components that you filmed. Can you explain to us a bit how it came about and what does it portray?

(8:38 - 10:52)

PBKL: So this is a silent video, this one. And it's composed of different footage, some of like DIY made by myself and some are archives and sometimes they're intertwined or layered on each other. And the idea that came first was I have all these objects from those performances that I've done. A lot about my diasporic position, the history of my family that I'm trying to connect to or to get access to, and also the history of colonialism between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo because I was born and raised in Belgium. And in this video, I brought all these objects from the past performances and tried to show the liveliness that they have for me after I perform with them.

They're not empty, they're not neutral, they're charged with experiences from the past. But as a performance artist, those objects are not art pieces by themselves. They're like objects become artifacts of the performance. And I can't just keep collecting objects from performances that I will not do it again, but it's hard to let them go at the same time because they're connected to those stories now. And so in this video, I wanted to talk about the sensation of suffocation that I have when I try to approach difficult histories and what the objects as a performance, artists helped me to do through those processes and navigations and what it is to put them in dialogue with the archives. So I'm using fabric that I use in my performances that is used in the video as layers, as structures of the image from archive that I use.

(10:52 - 12:41)

For example, right now, as we look at it, is an archive from happy times and clubs in Congo about trends with music and dance in the 60s and its also to show this always like coexistence between culture, collective joy, collective traditions, full scope of life that is coexistent with destruction, genocide, ecocide, colonial violence, imperialism, extraction, and how it's part of the same world, and how it creates in me sometimes this sensation of suffocation between wanting to connect and be there, and also the fear of what can also happen at the same time. So in this work, I'm really working with all those materials and trying to talk about, maybe not talk about, but make feel what I experience and what a lot of people in diaspora experience without saying any words, without writing any words, and how we can get through this topic about heaviness and sensation of suffocation. and how it might look like because it doesn't always look dark. The same way depression doesn't always look dark. You can have people who look happy around you, but are deeply depressed inside. And I wanted to be able to show these states. Yeah.

(12:41 - 14:07)

SLE: Interesting. Very interesting. And see that it connects us with the big middle piece where we see different waves and different static movements and moves in waves and we think about, we try not to see what it conveys but you have a specific meaning for this piece that we may not see from a first glance. Yes. So tell me a bit about this piece.

PBKL: So this piece is called Small Talk and It's a little bit the cynicism and pettiness in me coming from my own my position that, okay, if we can't talk about the genocost happening in the Congo, maybe we can talk about the weather under which is happening because the weather wherever we are in Canada or Quebec or in Belgium, it's part of our small talk. We always talk about the bad weather, the good weather, mostly bad weather in Belgium, as a way to have this small talk connection. And in my mind, like my thoughts, it's often about what's going on in the east of the Congo.

(14:07 - 16:25)

PBKL: And so that's my way to talk about what's going on, by talking about the weather in that part of the world. When I say genocost, the genocost is a specific term to describe and ask for accountability for what's happening in the Congo. So it's the genocide for economic gain. That's what the genocost is.

And we talk about millions and millions and millions of people being killed. We talk about in months a number of people being raped and tortured and displaced and enslaved and exploited in mines and fields.

And so this piece is, I make a code and I make requests to have weather data from different parts of the east of the Congo and also north and some south that are targeted by the genocost. And I receive all this data and then through my algorithm I make an extraction of of this information, this data information. And when it's really like now, like how we hear, it's become like granular and it could be drops, so it could be like drops in suspension in the air.

When it's a clear sky, it becomes more silky. Sometimes it looks like smoke to also evoke the forest being burned to have extraction happening. So that part is like the part of the ecocide of the whole system.

And before I used to work with data from the past, but for here this iteration of the piece, I'm working only with forecasts. The idea is that the data from the past, they will not change, but the forecasts change every hour. And so there's still this little hope that things could change in the future. that I wanted to work with. So right now we have the weather of Rubaiya on April 23rd, so in the future at 11pm in the night.

(16:25  - 18:44)

SLE: We hear your voice.

PBKL: Yes.

SLE: And you're naming different numbers. Why?

PBKL: So, there's a lot of reports and testimonies and articles and stories and messages about what's happening in the east of the Congo, but there's not a registry about the number of people being killed, the number of women and children being raped, etc. And so I was thinking if we had a registry with all the people being killed in the genocost, ordered by alphabetic order, the order within which it will be killed would be a random number. And so what this piece is trying to do is to not count, but name every victim.

But because I don't have a registry with all the names, I try to say those numbers as names. So I say a number. And I breathe in and breathe out as a way to witness and to hold space for every number name. And because also even the estimation is not fixed in the sense that there's a lot of discourse about it, which means that the number we hear a lot about 5.4 million or 6 million people killed is a number that is from 2008. And it's kind of like the estimation, official estimation got stuck at 6 million, like people stopped counting because it's so much. And we are in 2026. And so I'm working with those potential numbers. Some estimations go as far as 11 million, 16 million. And so I'm trying to get to those number names that are not counted for too.

(18:44 - 19:45)
PBKL: And this piece, if we wanted her to go over all the number names, it will require from someone to stand in front of it 24-7 for 13 years. And the idea is to also give a sense of the scope of the suffering and the damage of the genocost, because how can we even compute millions with our little brains? And the role between here, the three pieces, are interactive too, which means that they're only activated if someone is there to witness them. So this is we actually even take longer because if there's nobody in front of it, stops and we stay quiet.

(19:45 - 20:23)

SLE: It's very powerful and I think time is needed to really fully understand what you've created here. Thank you for the description of the work. And now we move on to the third space.

(20:23 - 22:31)

SLE: So now we move on to the third space. And we have a piece here that is constructed and there's words written inside of it that are lightly noticeable depending on where we stand. And you were talking a bit about genocost and that's what we see here in progress, genocost in progress. Can you explain to us a bit What was the intention for this piece?

PBKL: Yes. So the thing with the genocost, why, I mean, the genocost has been happening for 30 years. So we start, we count this genocaust since 1996, which was after the genocide in Rwanda. And that was like the genocaust started as a consequence of the genocide in Rwanda. And there's really difficulties talking about what's happening in the Congo. First of all, in Belgium where I grew up, because it's hard to talk about the Congo by itself because of the history, the colonial history, and a lot of denial still happening about the harm caused in the Congo from colonization, from Leopold II to the state of Belgium to still the problematic relationship happening between the two countries.

And the other reason why it's difficult to talk about it is because since it's like, since other countries are involved also in these genocost, it's hard for international community to point out how a country that was a victim of a genocide can also be involved in another genocide today, in the case of Rwanda, for example.

(22:31 - 24:23)

PBKL:  So it becomes hard to talk about what is happening to us because other things happened to other people before. And so this impossibility to talk about the genocost, I really wanted to give it form and shape and also visibility and invisibility. And in this space, I want to talk about how progress is a result also of the genocost, that the genocost is a cost, a sacrifice that we accept for progress, which is all the extraction that we are doing today that we need for our phones, for our computer, for our electric vehicle, for all kind of industrial processes needs minerals that are extracted in the Congo, in particular cobalt and coltan are two big ones, because the majority of the sources of those minerals are in the soil of the Congo.

And all these discussions about turning green and progress is actually not neutral. It involves people being killed, raped, displaced, exploited, enslaved. And we decided that it's okay to sacrifice Congolese people for that. So with the difficulty to talk about this and also because we're so an institution and it has been difficult to talk about genocide in school, in academia, in public space, the consequences from wanting to mobilize what is happening, I wanted to bring conversation about genocide in the space in a way that it can't be removed.

(24:23 - 26:03)

PBKL: So I create these kind of billboards or light box that is 6 meter long and only 6 inches deep and it's about maybe 100 feet high and no 100 inches high and behind is a text and then it's covered by specific material that make that text disappear depending on how we move. So if we enter the hallway that leads to the gallery, the billboard is like blank. And as we move along, letters are showing up. revealing the message behind and this message connect progress and genocost.

And the only moment you can actually see the whole message together, the best, is next to the elevator that gets you to get to the higher levels of the building. So it means that everybody getting out of the building from this place or coming to the building from this place, as they get in, the message will reveal themselves and they have to move through the day with the message or leave the institution with this message and making sure that this message is always there. And at the same time, if you just walk around and not pay attention, you don't see it at all.

(26:03 - 26:44)

SLE: I really find it interesting that you selected the space itself where it would be located so that when you come out of the elevator, you would see the message itself and as you move away, may decide what you do with this message and how it disappears. Because it's part of, like you were mentioning, the genocide cost. The genocost is a way of creating progress, like you were mentioning, but at what cost? At human cost. But it stays in your mind and what after that, what people can do with this message is up to them.

(26:44 - 27:45)

PBKL: Yes. And I made this piece specifically for the vitrine of FOFA, this section. And what I was about to say? I was about to say something.

SLE: You made this piece specifically for this space. Why this space?

PBKL: Yes, I made it specifically for this space because I want it to look like it could be part of all the institutional message. It could look like message boards that we have around. It looks very industrial. It's not using traditional mediums of art. It's actually very much material coming from industry and construction that is used and marketing that is used for this space.

(27:45 - 28:33)

SLE: And now we move to the last space. And we have four images that are, two are the same size and the other one is, the two others are smaller. And there's another sculpture that is on the ceiling from the wall to the ceiling. So it's really embedded, sort of placed, I would say, placed between the wall and the ceiling. And I think we see your face with your two hands that are on your face.

PBKL: Yeah.

SLE: Can you tell a bit more about this space? Because I think we see a portion of your face or your body. So what did you want to convey with this last piece here?

(28:33 - 30:03)

PBKL: This section is really about grief and what you're allowed to reveal as grief and what you're allowed to grieve. I feel that what is happening with the genocost, the fact that we let that happen for more than 30 years is a message to us Congolese, in Congo, on the African continent, in the diaspora that our lives are not grievable. Because if we mount to millions and millions and millions, what message does it say to us?

And so the idea was really to talk about the fact that we are not allowed to grieve or that those lives are considered as not grievable, but also at the same time how what our lives could have been is not grievable to because in my case, for example, me and my little brothers, we don't go to visit our family there because of the situation. So our diasporic situation and family situation is heavily impacted by the genocost and almost in the sense that if people get out of the region, they don't come back. So it's only one direction.

(30:03 - 31:39)

PBKL: So what it means about connection to the lands and waters from there, connection to family and community, ancestral land, ancestral traditions, knowing who you are, where you come from, on the top of the people being killed and tortured and enslaved. It's like this connection is not grievable. And I was really thinking about this idea that even grief is one of these emotions that is expected to be a noble one, just like this is a thing that you're allowed to feel because this is dead, so it's serious, but at the same time it's expected that you are respectable in your grief.

And what it means between, you know, these expectation to be respectable in your grief when I think about the woman in my family, but also at the same time how the genocost is not grievable. So the consequence of me, for example, not being able to know those people, go to the funerals, the reason why is not grievable itself.

And so in this piece, we see a lot of my face in the two small pictures that are really white and washed out. And the idea is to have to show this face that is not totally shown, but is also neutral. So one picture, for example, is actually not a picture of my face, but it's a picture with a game of light moving. And what we are actually photographing is the mask that I wear in the first picture we saw at the beginning.

(31:39 - 32:40)

PBKL: And this one, this other picture that is really blurry and there's some point we can sense is maybe a mouth and a nose. It's a picture behind layers of veil. So it's hiding the expression, it's just showing the features that are nodding neutral.

And on the two sides, the two bigger and darker pictures also about hiding pain and expression. This one is linked to the fact that I often learn about death in my bathroom when I wake up and then I check my phone. And I have this tendency to put my hands on my face to almost contain the emotion. And with my disability, I can't put my left hand on my face, so I use my right hand to put my left hand on my face.

(32:40 - 33:45)

PBKL: So it's like this connection. And the final one, I mean, the first one in the vitrine is also feeling contained in a box and also wrapped in this aluminium foil that is become like almost like separating from the smoke of the emotion and the information. And so it's like emotion contained in a space.

And finally, the sculpture up there is really trying to show how I have to make this emotion fit somewhere, not taking too much space. But this emotion is also big, so that's why it's bigger than my actual size. But it's still like stuck in a space where It doesn't take full space. It's just like hidden there. And people might not notice it. It's only if they come closer to the vitrine that they notice that actually this sculpture is there.

(33:45 - 35:36)

SLE: So you made your hands and your face bigger. Okay. Very interesting. And how is the exhibit? All of those piece, did you, I see that you gave a name to this project.

PBKL: Yeah. Yes.

SLE: Can you tell us a bit more about why did you choose this name and what is the name itself?

PBKL: So the name of the exhibition is Compartmental and it's mostly pieces from two series. One series is named Endling. Endling, I see it as a person, an instance that is the end of a line or the end of something, of a genealogy. And nothing I work with this idea of nothingness that you, this idea of void or the silence of things you can talk about, but also the nothingness in sense of like what can be contained in the structure. So it's like surplus of it and so it looks like nothing, but it's actually way more that can be contained and explained.

And the exhibition is named Compartmental as a way to have those sections that are like physical space, different physical space, also sections of time, and also psychologically how we section sometimes existence to be able to move on every day as a as a way to still do, but also not forget at the same time.

(35:36 - 36:05)

SLE: athat is so true. Sometimes we do compartmental things in order to go through life. And depending on what we go through, and sometimes just having those separated space can permit us to move on or to move forward or to move back.

PBKL: Yes.

SLE: Or to just be, yeah, just to. Thank you so much, Po, for explaining those four pieces that are very complex and very deep. Thank you.

PBKL:Thank you, Sendy-Loo.