#Extraction - Sammy Baloji in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

Sammy Baloji and Mpho Matsipa discuss Baloji’s work as it relates to colonialism, extraction and environmental catastrophes. They discuss the interconnectedness of planetary deterioration while working through and beyond the colonial archive, and an exploration of African material futures. Baloji’s photographic work, Essay on Urban Planning (2013) for instance, assembles past and present temporalities of Lubumbashi to show how the urban centre and the peripheral suburbs are separated by a strip of land that invokes a wider spectrum of species to reveal the mechanisms of colonial spatial logics embedded in city planning. Baloji’s earlier work leads to a larger body of work with similar sets of concerns, such as Extractive Landscapes (2019), his solo exhibition at Summer Academy at Stadtgalerie Museums pavillon in Salzburg, which addresses the ways in which complex histories are reflected in the landscape, and how it is inscribed in artefacts and landscapes by showing traces left by mining in the mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga. Foregrounding prototypes as preliminary versions from which other forms may be developed, this podcast volume on Prototypes creates room to iterate, imagine and improve upon new modes of connecting objects and subjects, materials and societies. The discussion reflects on Baloji's understanding of the entanglements of extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Cold War geo-politics and contemporary global capitalism. Demonstrating this inherent interconnectedness, Other Tales (2020) illustrates his assertion of the importance of decolonial narratives about the Congo, and histories of extraction, Baloji repurposes archival materials and portraiture to surface linkages between the Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial history and its neo-colonial present. Baloji’s creative practice includes orality and mnemonic elements to map memory; and his research practice includes questions about the spiritual and cultural associations that the people in the Katanga region have with their environment. He draws on Achille Mbembe’s formulation of the shared agency between humans and objects —engages the body not only as a site of possible liberation but also as a site of critique by discussing how objects are animated for human production. Using the example of how the digital realm is made possible by violence in the Congo, Baloji foregrounds the fact that the parts required to fabricate mobile phones and computers are inseparable from the exploitation of people and land in central Africa. While exploring ways to access material histories that speak to a larger conversation on the continuous colonial gestures of extraction in terms of residues, waste and toxicity, Baloji speculates on what African material futures might be, that might be rooted in histories of technology that precede the colonial encounter.