The Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck (University of Leuven) will speak about some of the ideas underlying ‘Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds’ (2016), a book he published in collaboration with Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji, in an attempt to rethink the urban archive and constitute it in alternative ways. If the (Central African) urban landscape seems to refuse inhabitation and appears as a black hole that makes any clear assessment of it simply disappear in the force of its corrosive gravity, the authors explore various – textual and visual, or horizontal and vertical – ways to investigate the hole and illuminate its blackness.

Filip De Boeck has conducted extensive field research in both rural and urban communities in D.R. Congo (ex-Zaire) since 1987. He is a professor of anthropology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), a research unit of the University of Leuven, Belgium. De Boeck is the author of ‘Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City’ (2004), a book he co-authored with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart. With Alcinda Honwana he edited ‘Makers and Breakers. Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa’ (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). De Boeck has also curated several exhibitions and won in 2004 a Golden Lion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice for ‘Kinshasa: Imaginary City’, an exhibition co-curated with architect and critic Koen Van Synghel. Together with Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji, De Boeck recently published ‘Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds’ (London: Autograph ABP,2016).

The lecture will be in English and takes place in the context of the exhibition Sarat Maharaj: AAH Room, which runs until 04.06.2017.