It was the post-revolution artistic movement of the Russian constructivists in the 1920s that sought the unity of the social, the political and the art. Western ‘modernity’, in which achievements in art and architecture were strongly driven by its notion of utopia regarding the emancipation of man, was imposed on the colonies in the 20th century through forms split off from the avant-garde discourses that instigated its forms in Europe.

The main component of Angela Ferreira’s installation in Lubumbashi is a ‘modern’ wood-light sculpture installed on top of the GPM gas station on Avenue Munongo in the ‘colonial’ centre of the city. The building designed by the Belgian architect Claude Strebelle building is paradigmatic of an architecture that a number of European colonial powers introduced in the 1950s all over the African continent. Today the discussion on this architecture oscillates between notions of a ‘shared heritage’ and an ‘architecture dissonante’.
Strebelle’s modernist architecture with its carefully designed façade becomes in Ferreira’s installation the plinth for her sculpture, which in turn evokes Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s never built project for the monument to the Third International in the Soviet Union, an international association of national communist parties founded in 1919. Ferreira ‘renders’ Tatlin’s monument into a sculpture, which explicitly ‘quotes’ the monuments hallmark of an inclination of 23.4o, a reference to the earth’s axial tilt as a symbol for the univer- salism of unfulfilled utopian goals.

The sculpture will be ‘inaugurated’ with a performance presenting the poem/song ‘Je vais entrer dans la mine’ in the formerly dominant language Kibemba. The lyrics tell of a man writing to his mother about his fears that he will die having being forced to enter the mines. The filmed performance will be presented during the course of the Biennale on a screen installed in the shop window of the gas station.

A further project based on Ângela Ferreira’s stay in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be produced in Lubumbashi and Lisbon to be presented at the Lumiar Cité exhibition space in Spring 2014. The Lubumbashi Biennial Rencontres Picha 2013 is curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose.