Contemporânea

History’s Body, History’s Voice

Sammy Baloji is an acclaimed artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, now living in Belgium. He will present the work Missa Utica on 19 September 2026 at CAM Gulbenkian in Lisbon. On this occasion, we discussed the background of this specific performance piece, as well as the artist’s broader views on his artistic journey. His work has long examined the histories of his home country and the ways in which colonial systems continue to shape the production of knowledge about the DRC.

Baloji’s practice began with tracing objects displaced from their original contexts, such as photographs, architectural fragments, letters, minerals, maps, and archival documents that become points of departure for questioning how history is constructed, classified, and transmitted. While recovering what has been erased, Baloji’s work examines the structures that produced the erasure in the first place.

In recent years, his practice has increasingly moved toward performance. Missa Utica, first developed in 2024, marks an important moment in this trajectory. The work brings together music, text, bodies, and images to revisit the early encounters between Europe and the Kingdom of Kongo, the spread of Christianity, the emergence of the slave trade, and the longer histories of colonial power that followed.

For Baloji, performance became a way of doing something that the archive alone could not accomplish. “I came looking to give a voice and a body,” he explains—not to the archive itself, but as a way of taking back the narrative.

This distinction is fundamental to his practice. Archives, traditionally, are spaces accessible primarily to professionals: researchers, historians, curators, and other specialists who are equipped to interpret documents and situate them within established contexts. Baloji became interested in what happens when those documents leave the archive and enter the space of an exhibition, where their authority can appear intact, but their complexity can quickly become opaque.

His engagement with this question intensified after his participation in documenta 14 in 2017. Invited to work in Athens, he began by looking at the history of Greece and European colonialism, but the research gradually expanded southwards, towards Africa and beyond. The geographical categories of North and South became progressively unstable. Rather than referring only to a European North and an African South, they began to describe a more global network of historical, economic, and political relationships.

This geographical expansion also brought him back to the Congo through different moments in time. The history of the contemporary Congolese state is inseparable from the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the colonial project that followed, but Baloji insists on placing this history alongside the much earlier history of the Kingdom of Kongo, whose political and cultural structures were already deeply developed by the 16th century. The gesture of juxtaposing two historical periods seems simple, yet doing so destabilises the idea of colonialism as the beginning of Congolese history. It also reveals the extent to which the Congo has been repeatedly “invented” through external categories and narratives.

The 19th-century colonial project was justified by the Europeans through the language of civilisation. Leopold II’s Congo was presented as a mission to bring Christianity, modern values, and so-called civilisation to populations the Belgians deemed “savage.” Baloji’s work exposes this false logic, seeing the histories that preceded colonialism as evidence of other forms of modernity, political organisation, and cultural complexity.

His research into the early relationship between the Kingdom of Kongo and Portugal led him to the letters exchanged between King Afonso I of Kongo and King Manuel I of Portugal, held in the Torre do Tombo archives in Lisbon. The letters became an important material presence in the work: evidence of a diplomatic relationship that predates the colonial occupation of the Congo by centuries.

Baloji became interested not only in what these documents say, but in how they are encountered. He recalls exhibiting facsimiles of the letters and observing that visitors often did not read them. Handwritten documents placed behind glass inside a vitrine produce a particular kind of distance. The archive remains visible, but the documents become objects to be looked at rather than texts to be read. This realisation became an important methodological question: how can archival material be activated?

Missa Utica is a possible response. The letters, objects, and historical events of the archive are brought into contact with embodied voices, enactments, music, and theatricality. The performance collapses different periods: the first encounters between Christianity and the Kingdom of Kongo; the development of the slave trade; the competition between European empires; the violence of Belgian colonialism; and the 20th-century history of the DRC.

The connections he draws are both chronological and economic. In tracing the emergence of the slave trade, Baloji also points towards the beginnings of capitalism and the development of plantation economies, with São Tomé functioning as an early laboratory for this system. The plantation transformed the organisation of labour and the circulation of bodies: systems of exploitation increasingly sought to produce and reproduce labour locally, making bodies themselves part of an economic infrastructure. These histories are inseparable from the competition between empires and from the development of technologies that would later allow forms of extraction and production to be expanded, replaced, and intensified.

The Missa Luba, a Catholic mass created in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s by Franciscan missionaries using Congolese musical traditions, becomes another crucial point of connection. Its subsequent circulation in Europe and the United States reveals the complex dynamics of colonial cultural production—a musical form could be celebrated internationally, while the colonial conditions that enabled its production remained largely invisible and unquestioned. The artist situates this history by mixing European classical music with Congolese rumba and spoken text. The space of the performance allows for multiple times and cultural forms to encounter one another.

This approach is closely connected to Baloji’s understanding of time. Western historical narratives often imagine time as linear: one event follows another, and periods are separated into distinct categories. However, human lives do not experience history in this way, as different historical periods coexist within bodies, landscapes, objects, and cultural practices, like processes of creolisation. “Questioning time is questioning history,” Baloji suggests.

To question historical time is therefore also to question who has the authority to organise it, and what classifications and contextualisations make one period legible while another disappears. For Baloji, it is important to create polyphonic forms of reading. He is not interested in replacing one official truth with another, but in bringing different documents, objects, and perspectives into proximity. One piece of evidence can be read against another. Meaning emerges through negotiation. This is why he resists the fetishisation of the archive. The archive is never neutral, as its categories, classifications, and systems of access are themselves products of particular epistemologies and power structures.

The same applies to museum objects. Congolese artefacts looted from their communities and placed in European ethnographic museums are transformed by displacement. “Scientific” descriptions may provide information about an object, but they can never restore the social, ritual, or spiritual relationships through which that object originally functioned. For Baloji, this is one of the central problems of the museum. During a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in 2017, he encountered a different model through the institution’s work with Native American communities. He became particularly interested in processes through which sacred objects and human remains were returned, but also in the invitation extended to communities to determine how their own cultures should be represented within the museum.

In Lubumbashi, where Baloji has been active in building artistic infrastructures, this question becomes practical rather than theoretical. His work with the independent art and research centre Picha and the Lubumbashi Biennale is part of the same artistic practice. Building structures, creating spaces for exchange, bringing international artists to the Congo and connecting local realities with international circuits are all ways of keeping narratives alive. The museum, the biennial, and the archive are not only institutional contexts for art, but also technologies for producing and circulating knowledge.

This becomes especially apparent when Baloji connects cultural archives to another form of extraction: the extraction of natural resources. Colonial knowledge was not produced only to control territory. Disciplines such as geology, anthropology, and other colonial sciences also participated in understanding what lay beneath the earth, classifying it and making it available for extraction.

The logic is continuous: conquering, controlling, extracting, transforming, and circulating materials within a global economy, while continually adapting the technologies through which bodies, land, and resources can be made productive. The Congo’s mineral resources connect to contemporary technologies and global security; nuclear technologies connect to uranium; economic structures connect to colonial extraction; cultural institutions connect to systems of classification and ownership. What changes across these periods is the technologies and forms of organisation through which extraction becomes possible, while the underlying relations of power remain the same.

The separation of histories can therefore itself become a form of propaganda. Political and economic systems construct borders between places, periods, and populations, while resources move freely across them. Minerals can travel from the Congo into global technological and financial systems, while people, stories, and cultural objects encounter much more restrictive borders. One of the reasons is that bodies are also archives. They carry histories not only through what they say, but through ways of being, sitting, looking, listening, and occupying space. Knowledge can be embodied.

The question of the museum therefore becomes inseparable from the question of where knowledge is produced and for whom. Baloji’s experience with Native American communities at the Smithsonian made him reconsider the assumption that the museum should necessarily reproduce a European institutional model. What would a museum look like if it were conceived from within the realities of the communities whose objects and histories it holds? In this sense, restitution is not only about the return of objects, but also about the return of authority: who decides what can be shown, what can remain unseen, how an object should be contextualised, and where it belongs once an exhibition ends.

This question resonates with Baloji’s work in Lubumbashi through Picha and the Lubumbashi Biennale. Building artistic infrastructures is a way of creating spaces in which local realities can generate their own forms of exchange and visibility, rather than simply being inserted into pre-existing international frameworks. Some European cultural institutions and biennials may offer possibilities for counternarratives, but the question remains whether those narratives can also transform the structures through which they are received.

This is perhaps where Baloji’s understanding of art as a language becomes most important. Because he is interested in creating the conditions for more complex forms of reading, his method is fundamentally polyphonic: different documents, objects, periods, sounds, and bodies are placed in relation where no single piece of evidence claims to contain the whole story. The speculative dimension of his practice allows these fragments to illuminate one another across time, connecting what is usually separated into categories such as precolonial and colonial, cultural and economic, human and non-human, past and present.

The political potential of art lies in the epistemological space it can create: a space from which we can ask whose perspective is shaping our understanding of a society, what references are being used, and what forms of knowledge have been excluded. Art becomes a language through which these relationships can be made perceptible, negotiated, and reimagined. The past does not become present through reconstruction; it becomes present when it enters into relation with bodies, sounds, memories, and struggles that continue to inhabit the contemporary world. History is not behind us; it is before us, speaking through the bodies and voices that carry it.

Sammy Baloji

CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

Missa Utica is part of the Performance Program My Center is Not in the Solar System, under the artistic direction of Celina Brás and curated by Alexandra Balona.