
“Sammy Baloji and Filip De BoeckUrban Now: City Life in Congo”
Urbanity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is marked by a precarious entanglement of colonial past and globalized present, of decrepit infrastructure and formidable social resilience. This spring at Wiels, Congolese artist Sammy Baloji and Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck will team up to tackle these incongruities. Investigating what sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone has called “people as infrastructure,” fifty of Baloji’s photographs will illustrate the ways city dwellers organize in and around the seemingly dysfunctional environments of Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, and