Kongo Astronauts’ multimedia installation for the UNESCO World Heritage site Völklinger Hütte, Saarland, Germany, including;
Performance suits:
Unheimliche Spacewalker (The Haunting Strangeness of Borders), 2024
Multimedia – electronic circuits, fabric, wire, found objects, and black spray paint
Refracted Reality Spacewalker, 2024
Multimedia – electronic circuits, fabric, wire, found objects, and silver spray paint
Rising and Falling Skies Spacewalker, 2024
Multimedia – electronic circuits, fabric, wire, found objects, and gold spray paint
0,55 Grams Raw Material track #01 (stay tuned), 2024
a psychotronic 3-channel video
Dur: 7:21
Directed and edited by Eléonore Hellio.
Performance and soundscape by Pisko Crâne.
Music: Loner Muaka+Aaron Watson (Maison Thyme)
Appearances by DRCongo guests: Hzahora, Pape Noir, Mamans de Lusanga, Maman Bopasa, Daniela Ewango ©Kongo Astronauts, 2024
The electronic devices employed in the creation of this film contain approximately 0.55 grams of raw Coltan, extracted from land torn apart under the influence of global technocratic predation, ravaged by ultra-violent conflicts inherited from industrial and colonial extractivist logic. In eastern DRC, this mineral finances death.
In this haunted fiction, a being transformed into rubber tubes tries to embrace a woman. This entity is no longer a subject, but an interface of an opaque system, a product of centuries of assignment. Generations reflect within it, shattered in broken mirrors.
Between the mutilating legacy of colonial rubber in the DRC and the steel shadows of the Völklinger Hütte, the Kongo Astronauts’ Spacewalker tries to catch the frequencies of a fractured world.
There is in this film a persistence of the real: matter, memory, survival.
Within the all-vibrant pulse of these 0.55 grams of matter resonate planetary scars and interrupted futures. Yet a network of energies, assemblages, and intensities do not yield. It pulses with a force that escapes logics of destruction.
Photos: Hans-Georg Merkel / Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte