Apology of the Apocalypse
or Treaty of Despair ?

Kinshasa. Monday in the mud until the bad mood of the city. Almost in the green countryside, a hill after the campus. Several crossings of the old taxi in pools of water that transformed the machine in amphibious car, against all odds. And I stupidly told me I will not leave the car if…The car stops at a clean break of the road in pieces several meters below. Articlaut Francis, a Kinshasa dentist and collector, and me get out the car walking down to about 500 yards from the collapsed road which is sometimes a bunch of tar as fungus.

Young artists from the Fine Arts Academy, together in a collective called SADI (Artists' Solidarity for Integral Development), invite us to visit the "village of erosion" of Gafula Mount whose houses collapsed during each heavy rain. Impressive this ruinique scenery. Trésor Mukonkole, Yves Sambu, Kruchna Mongovo-Masangila, I had already met, Alain Nziza Polo and Fransix Tenda paint on pieces of insulated walls and on houses on the brink of collapse. A maze of red paths is dominated by those parts of walls and houses in unstable equilibrium. All eyes look really gray skyward. We're in the rainy season. in this hillside  district where no improving of sanitation has never been realized, the path is the rivers bed. We go up, down again, cross a small market and its school of which one half is already fallen into the ravine and the other half is covered with drawings of our friends SADI that "people" full of his comments during joint meetings. People everywhere are busy with sandbags to direct water away from the hill and their home. Same sandbags are placed to reconstruct roads, steps for a one day walk. To continue to live. Anxiety is everywhere with threat of next rain. We arrived at the house of Trésor Mukonkole who boarded his buddies to promote the Fine Arts Academy to work in this area. Sometimes people do not understand and believe that they have received money to do that. It is only their commitment to a vision where "art" should bring something to the people and get out the nasty galleries of the city. You feel the power of the elements, the impotence of the population and more of the government, who regularly comes to make speeches that nothing happens.

What does this really political artwork ? I do not know. More an apology of the apocalypse than a treaty of despair. And that's probably why I take this keyboard to blacken few pages. The scenery is so dramatic that I forget drama as drama goes alone on stage. The work of our artists emphasizes the effect. Artwork also related to ephemeral as drawings and paintings fall with the walls gathered in piles of bricks losted in the red soil then mixed with water in devastating whirlwind of raw evil. In paintings, sometimes words denounce and much more rarely implore "Please, help us". I like living city metaphor, these of Kinshasa but also these of all the men cities. My god, it's a beautiful image of absurd of human temporality, here in a accelerated film which himself can be part as a pile of black blocks. This is certainly not the way I feel pity or duty to "give", I feel another need, that of living, feeling that fear, getting out of my head. I can not share anything else, much less play the good Samaritan despite my skin color thinking some ones that I come with solutions.

Upon your return a bit rushed by weather, the rain began to fall. We climbed back up the collapsed road when the village began to despair. Another 500 meters until the car stopped at the first collapse of the road. Rain quickly became downpour impassable. We took refuge under a canopy's bar, a makeshift bar (a ganda), the last house standing before the great flaw that finally won the rest of the road. The route of water has changed the way, taking a few cubic meters of soil creating cliffs several meters high. The roads of raging water become roads of men who forget water during the dry season for now only believe the road to man. Plots are still selling it is said here. It is not wind but water. People cry searching for their child. Crying-codes are run screaming as soon as it's a threat of house collapse. A quarter of an hour ? Not nearly two hours we expect to see swelling water in torrent that becomes impassable. A house has been washed away. Everyone watches. Sometimes a laugh, that kind of laughter that are a way of saying his fear, his anxiety. All eyes are hard. A piece of land disappears.

Now rain is less strong. All those waiting are back on the road hidden under a film of water that we do not know the thickness. I plunge several times in water holes to the calf. I am filled with uncontrolled laughing. People we meet also laugh seeing two Mundélés (White men) in the mud. Sure we have nothing to do there. In fact one has nothing to do there. Most people going against the current, move fast to get back into their house, hoping it was still here and that the family is also there, all together. I now understand better the place that would been less sensitive for us without the rain and the fear that collapsed where we expect the end. A section of house was already gone upstream. Downstream other houses were lowered by several meters to form a rubble mass. Two days later I learned that the Ganda in which we were sheltered collapsed too.

Finally we haven'tt seen any works, but live an experience. Could we say it is art ? Probably because we never would have come without the artists requested. Play with the human tragedy would be appalling if we had not lived it, few minutes under the months which pass. To say that suffering has always been an attraction, an expression of the world of forms ... whatever it is, is it necessary ? Do we have the right to play with the aesthetics of death and despair of others ? Is not the purview of the imagery of engaged art and humanitarian photography who accumulate for decades, pictures on pictures of human disaster ? Yet not one second I felt sorry, I just felt an anxiety that I could share during an insignificant moment compared to the times. The beauty of the disaster that surprises you, the muscle fatigue that prevents you from going on, the whirling of a rational discourse on the irresponsibles of politics that have nothing to do here, I'm pinned like a butterfly in old losted box. I came to meet five young artists "in residency" at the house of one of them, Trésor Mukonkole. His house of cement blocks and its veranda looks solid, well established. If everything around his house collapses, it will leave too. But not right now. It feels safe. We also looked at his drawings, paintings and small sculptures made of taped paper.

On returning from this harbor, under the rain, waiting, we felt what forms mean, especially when they confront nature with the devastating and so strong nature. Commitment against nature, against the Nature, against the very idea that Nature has the last word, crumbles and collapses, leaving the choice between the ecstasy of the Apocalypse and the despair of fate. The feeling is mixed, while having confronted — in spite of ourselves — those rare moments where we are nothing, seeing the last picture falls in the torrent. It is in the night that only the headlights illuminate. In the taxi, completely soaked and muddy, we stop laughing. The car moves slowly across the campus to prevent the pools now impassable. The rare and blade city lights turn pedestrian in black and blinded shadows, framed by the window of the car.