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Postcolonial Dilemma Track #04 (Remix Mix) is the 2019 incarnation of a film series of the same name, Kongo Astronauts’ films being infinitely remixable, as Eléonore Hellio, filmmaker and co-founder of Kongo Astronauts, explains.

The film’s non-narrative journey opens with a metaphor of “extractavism”—which Kongo Astronauts defines as the economic process of colonial and post-colonial extraction that operates both on natural resources as well as on human subjects. In Kinshasa, an environmental warning manifests in a machete dance, and a barefooted man ascending a trash-strewn jungle path evokes abuse of our planet. A masked man with a fiery weapon links violence in eastern Congo with themes of ecology. A Darth Vader figure cannot remove the burden of imposed western systems represented by his mask. One spacewalker is asking the viewer to pay attention while the other is losing control. Bebson Elemba burns dysfunctional objects, creating toxic fumes. Though we seem to be in the belly of the beast, there is also a flower, an owl, a flock of birds, and children making music out of garbage. In the end, clay is being formed, evoking past, present, and future possibilities.

The film epitomizes, for Eléonore Hellio, how Kongo Astronauts itself “manifests in the interzone of digital globalization, where past, present ,and future collide, running headlong into the politics of intimacy and the identities of urban lives.” 

Hellio, behind the camera and the editor, titles this remix as a “psychotronic” work within the “multidimensional world of Bebson Elemba,” musician, performance artist, and inventor of musical instruments, who features in the film. Also on screen are Kongo Astronauts performance artist and designer Michel Ekeba, as well as artist Danniel Toya and CATPC artist Mbuku Kimpala.

• Excerpted from texts by Dominique Malaquais, curator and art historian.