Since 2013, reports have emerged of sightings of a cosmonaut walking the streets of Kinshasa at odd times and manifesting in various Kinshasa neighborhoods. These Spacewalkers have been the creation of a Kinshasa-based group—part artists’ collective, part think-tank—known as Kongo Astronauts. Subsequently, multiple KA Spacewalkers have manifested across time and space, traversing urban and rural environments.
In KA’s 2021 “SCrashed_Capital.exe” series, a Spacewalker reappears in the DRC capital city wearing a new e-waste suit. The circuit boards seen on this Spacewalker (and found in nearly all electronic devices, including cell phones, laptops, and gaming consoles) are mainly fabricated in China using tantalum, a chemical element extracted from coltan, one of the five “conflict minerals,” of which DRC provides 80% of the world’s supply. Tantalum is named after the Greek mythological villain Tantalus because of the “tantalizing” challenge of dissolving this element, due to its high density and resistance to heat and acids. Tantalus was doomed to be forever surrounded by good things without permission to enjoy them, suggesting a parallel with the citizens of the DRC, living in a country widely considered the world’s richest in terms of natural resources but who remain among the world’s most economically oppressed—because of exclusionary neocolonial extractivist exploitation.
The Spacewalker’s presence highlights the social, economic, and environmental problems that Kinshasa’s 17-million population face. Memories are compromised and on hold while instability and trauma dominate society, with violent histories still aching to be addressed. As the title suggests with references to a computer crash, to many Congolese, it feels as if the scratch disks have crashed, and the “.exe” suggests a reboot is necessary. The series title also juxtaposes the digital domain and the realm of capital.Speculation, it seems clear, is at the core of these cosmonaut’s appearances. This is so in two regards. First is the fact that they seek to prompt speculation among their viewers. They give few clues as to why they amble through the city. On occasion, they have been known to help a person in need—crossing a street, changing a tire—but, as a general proposition, they do nothing in particular. This raises a lot of questions. Second, their presence opens up spaces of possibility—of moves that might eventually be made. Not committed to any particular course of action, the Spacewalker is investing in the future of an as-yet-unknown prospect. Put differently, Spacewalkers are making space—building a possible stage—which they may or may not choose to act upon in the future. In as radically unstable a post-war context as Kinshasa’s, this double use of speculation makes a great deal of sense.