Sammy Baloji, Aequare. The Future that Never Was, 2023. Still. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès.
Professor Johan Lagae, Dissecting Congo’s spatial palimpsests
Notes on mobilising the ‘colonial archive’ and walking the field in a conversation between art and architectural history.
In this lecture, Professor Johan Lagae (Ghent University) built on his two decades long collaboration with Sammy Baloji. He discussed how his research as an architectural historian, working on the history of the current Democratic Republic of Congo, has evolved through the confrontation of his discipline with artistic practice. Starting from his and Baloji’s most recent collaboration in the context of the Venice Architectural Biennale, and reading backwards till their first conversations on urban heritage in Lubumbashi, Lagae provided an insight in how his understanding of Congo’s architectural and urban landscapes has shifted over time, through walking the field with Baloji and others. Drawing on the notion of ‘palimpsest’, he unveiled how practices of architectural historical research can be enriched through dialogues on how contemporary environments are perceived and lived-in, in order to produce deep mappings that illustrate the entanglements of the past with the present and the future.
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BIOGRAPHY
Johan Lagae is a full Professor at Ghent University and currently teaches 20th century architectural history with a global focus. He obtained his PhD degree in 2002 with a study of 20th century colonial architecture in Central Africa. He was a Chercheur invité de la Fondation de France at the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris in 2007 and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris in 2019-2020. His research interests include colonial and postcolonial architecture; urban planning and urban history in (Central) Africa; colonial-built heritage; and colonial photography. He is currently co-editor of the open access online ABE journal, and is involved in several major research projects. His most recent publication is African Modernism and its Afterlives, a volume co-edited with Nina Berre and Paul Wenzel Geissler in 2022. He has been involved as a (co-)curator in several national and international Congo- and Africa-related exhibitions. He first met Sammy Baloji in 2005 and has collaborated with him for many years, in the context of the Picha Biennale in Lubumbashi as well as other events, most recently the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2023.
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