Hearing Room: Black Magic (2024) is an installation consisting of two semi-circular walls facing each other invoking a courtroom. Featuring documents from institutional collections, the installation explores colonial history as if it is on trial, and how this history is remediated today. Inspired by a report by the Governor General of the Belgian Congo (1950s), who drew up ‘a list of sects and religious movements directed against the whites of the country’ and stated that ‘the Belgian authorities have unleashed a movement of systematic repression against these sects based on black magic and demonology’. The installation links two historical sequences that took place in the context of the Cold War, in the Congo and in Belgium, both of which involved political crimes linked to the financial, industrial and judicial world. The condemnation of the prophet Simon Kimbangu, followed by the repression of the followers of his Kimbanguist Church, accused of spreading anti-colonial beliefs, is juxtaposed with the assassination of the Belgian politician Julien Lahaut, whose investigation ended in 1972 with a strange dismissal. Based on these two stories, Hearing Room examines the role of the document in establishing facts, and the spatiality of the courtroom in relation to fiction and narrative. Inspired by a reflection on the notion of ‘conflict montage’ borrowed from cinema and theatre, Duchatelet restages entanglements that run through Belgian and Congolese colonial and post-colonial history.
Hearing Room: Black Magic, 2024 mixed media, dimension variable. produced by Busan Biennale Organizing Committee and FWB / Thanks to Widukind De Ridder of Cegesoma for research assistance and Minne De Meyer Engelbeen for her help.
The collages contain fragments of: Archival photographs from the Africa Museum (Belgium): HP.1960.4.339, HP.1960.4.338, collection MRAC Tervuren; photo J. Makula (Inforcongo), 1960 © MRAC Tervuren/Makula. Archival documents from Cegesoma, Brussels, Belgium. Le Grand Saint Michel, by Raffaello Sanzio, 1518. Map of Congo Free State with territorial subdivisions of concessionaires, end of 19th begin of 20th century, 1889, NAB, Archives Hubert Droogmans, no. 96. The sound piece contains a fragment of: Le Groupe Théâtral Kimbanguiste de Kinshasa (Direction Générale), Congo Mboka Kimbangu amonela mpasi, recorded in Kinshasa, 2010.