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.