The body as archive: Interview with Faustin Linyekula

At Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Faustin Linyekula activates the archive of his own body. Can dance be a strategy to summon the women in one’s family, or to tell what a colonial archive cannot? The Congolese choreographer on resisting bodies, restitution and his struggle against the ‘hyper-centralization of life’.

Late May, Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula brings his new performance My Body, My Archive to Bozar as part of Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Linyekula will explore his past, surrounded by statues representing his female ancestors, and under the trumpet accompaniment of Heru Shabaka-Ra (Sun Ra Orchestra). He has the impression that he has been making the same performance for years, only titles and collaborators change. Linyekula's work constitutes a permanent search for the meaning of his name, which he sees not only as the letters that identify him, but also as an opening to a complex network of relationships: with himself, with history, with geography, and with others. In 2018, he performed Banataba in collaboration with Moya Michael, outside of the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren. The same themes indeed return five years later: restitution, the colonial fragmentation of knowledge transmission, and the role of women in history.

Linyekula prefers to call himself a storyteller rather than a choreographer or dancer. An impressive international career did not stop him from establishing his Studios Kabako in his hometown Kisangani. Coming from the Congolese capital Kinshasa, Kisangani can only be reached by air or water. After all, stories from exile do not interest Linkeyula. Studios Kabako aims to be more than the physical location of his dance company: it is a place of artistic experimentation and exchange among young Congolese creators. Creating spaces for imagination is at the core of Linyekula’s artistic mission.

In 2020, an earlier version of My Body, My Archive was to be shown at London's Tate Modern, but corona complicated matters. A performance about how the body deals with intergenerational trauma and colonial knowledge fragmentation remains particularly relevant today. A few months ago, the Belgian parliamentary Congo Commission turned out to be a damp squib due to disagreement about apologies for the colonial past. Meanwhile, the long-lasting conflict that has taken countless lives in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continues. Linyekula's artistic practice is situated at the delicate intersection between past and present. As he himself says, if history doesn't give us answers, perhaps artists can?

Your new performance is called My Body, My Archive. How did you arrive at the notion of the body as archive?

'Before the arrival of the colonizer, our people did not have writing, but they archived their experiences in a different way, through masks, images, songs and stories. All these forms of archiving were broken up with the arrival of the colonizer, who imposed a different kind of archive. This means that when one is interested in our history, or when one asks about the archive, one has to look differently. Especially since most of these pre-colonial archives - the ones that were not destroyed - have been taken away. I often speak of the Congo as a mirror shattered by history. The pieces of that mirror are scattered all over the world. The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren is an important example of a place where many pieces of our mirror have been taken to. If we do not have access to this kind of archive in Congo, what can we turn to if we want to understand ourselves? Even if the colonial archive were accessible to us, we cannot base our knowledge on it because it is the archive of the conqueror.

Realizing this, I began to wonder if my body, too, could be a kind of archive. Even a baby born today carries experiences of previous generations. Couldn't dancing be a way to explore my body? The point is not to tell the body what to do, but to bring the body into certain states in which it might - I hope - begin to speak. If my body begins to speak, will I be able to understand that language that comes from the experience of the generations before me? I don't know, but at least I'm going to ask the question.

'The difficulty in accessing the national archive also brought me to my own family archive. In recent years, I have traveled to my maternal grandfather's village to learn about our family history. When we talk about the history of a family, we should first note that only men's names are transmitted. I began to question those around me. Where are the women? Why don't we talk about them? Then I realized that maybe all these women, my grandmothers, are mine too, because I am their son. Could dancing be a way to awaken the women who are inside me? I turned to a Lengola sculptor named Gbaga and asked him to represent the women of my clan, because in Lengola culture, sculptures can bring the ancestors back to life. If history doesn't give us answers, perhaps artists can.'

You once said that the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo is a history of violence against the body. How can this Congolese body, which has suffered so much violence, free itself?

'In fact, not only the history of Congo, but history in general can be studied through the evolution of forms of violence against the body. Even in European societies, all social and political systems seem somehow designed to contain the body. Religion, for example, is a way of controlling the body. Even if the violence is not as literal as cutting off hands, torturing or killing, other forms of violence and of confinement of the body persist, even in Western societies.’

'Regarding Congo, it is true that violence against the body can be taken literally. The rape of women is used as a weapon of war, people are tortured and killed. Yet in the midst of all that, bodies seem to resist this permanent degradation in their own way. Even in the Congolese context, the body has always refused to be completely confined: in fact, it is the ultimate bastion against confinement, against violence. One way the body resists is through dance. Many Congolese popular dances were invented in the streets. When I see shegues (homeless children, ed.) inventing dance moves in the streets, I see bodies escaping, refusing to be subjugated. In the end, we don't have to help the body, it is the body that will help us.'

Can dance also be a way to forget?

‘No, certainly not. Forgetting is the last thing we should do. We should activate the body to make remembrance possible. Because if the body remembers, it may also remember the survival strategies of those who came before us. We must not forget the strategies that our ancestors invented and embedded in the body precisely because of the violence that keeps recurring.’

You talk about forms of remembering that oppose the colonial written archive, such as masks and sculptures. Restitution is a recurring theme in your work.

‘The question I ask myself is: what does restitution mean beyond the discussions between intellectual and political elites? What does it mean in Banataba, the village of my grandfather, the village of my ancestors? How can the issue of restitution go beyond the return of objects and become a way to reclaim our history at the local level? For me, it's not just about the masks and sculptures themselves. What matters is that the young people growing up in Banataba today know how to make such masks and sculptures and know how to store today's history in them. That would be a more interesting form of restitution than returning objects and placing them in museums, where they become prisoners, as they have been in Europe for decades. Don't get me wrong, that form of restitution can also be valuable, but not everyone has the means to travel to Kinshasa for a museum visit. What interests me is the restitution of knowledge, restitution at the community level. What can we create when we know how to archive like our ancestors? Today we can also archive through video and other technologies. What could that combination of archiving methods generate?’

You take that criticism of the supposed centrality of Kinshasa seriously. In 2006, you decided to move your dance studio Kabako from the capital to Kisangani in northeastern Congo. Kisangani is the city where you grew up, but it was also a deliberate move to challenge the centrality of Kinshasa?

‘In dance, there has always been a notion of center and periphery in relation to space. This notion came to us as a colonial legacy because the theater spaces we move in today are a European design. They were developed by the Italians during the Renaissance. It is frontal theater: the best place to watch a performance was the royal box—the box of the powerful—around which the whole theater was built. Around the same time, perspective was invented in painting and cartography. That happened at a time when Europe was conquering the world and trying to impose its own perspective. Because cartography narrows the world. Just like the theater building, it propagates a one-sided, dominant view of the world. But later, we understood that more perspectives are possible. The European view, or the view of the king in his theater box, is just one of many. Perhaps the center does not need to have a fixed place. There are as many centers as there are dancers in the room.’

‘From the moment I understood that, I realized that I could be in Kisangani and still be at the center of the world. Because Kinshasa is just one point, Kisangani is another, just like Sydney, or Tokyo, or Paris: mere points. No point is more important than another. That was the basic principle, the general philosophy. The Democratic Republic of Congo has always been an extremely centralized state. Life seems impossible outside of Kinshasa. For me, setting up a project like Studios Kabako in Kisangani is also a way to resist the hypercentralization of life. In Kisangani, or anywhere else, life is possible if we accept that we can build ourselves from any point, from our own center of the world.’

You also present your performances in Kisangani and even in Banataba, the village of your grandfather. How does that experience differ from your performances in Europe?

‘Contemporary art is perceived as somewhat bizarre everywhere in the world. The question for me is: Is it possible to create a sense of identification with this strange creature? Is it possible for me to be in Banataba, present my performance, and have people recognize something, even if they don't fully understand it?’

‘Perhaps the major difference between performances in Europe and Congo is that Congolese spectators don't look at me with a Western art historical baggage. They don't try to compare my work to the performance of a European artist who did this or that. Intellectuals sometimes do, saying that my performances are 'not African enough.' In fact, their definition of what is African is a reproduction of the colonial gaze. But most people who come to my performances in Congo don't look through that limiting lens. They don't ask themselves: Is this African or not? They are present in the moment. If my work resonates with them, it resonates. They don't wait until the end of the performance to express that. I need that, just as I need to perform in Europe. The whole point of the colonial project was to turn us into little Europeans. Well, they succeeded: I am also European. I'm just trying to connect with people, whether they are in Congo or Europe.’

European spectators expect your work to be ‘African’?

‘Twenty years ago, a French newspaper published an article about me. The conclusion was: Faustin Linyekula has talent, but he wastes it by not wanting to be African. Apparently, there are still people today who know what it is to “be African”. If I do what I do, it's precisely because I don't know what it is to be African. I see how Africans reinvent themselves all the time. How languages and ways of life are constantly redesigned. External elements, these days often from China, are creatively appropriated or dismissed. A permanent process of reinvention is taking place.’

‘That is why, over time, I've learned not to put my energy into those expectations and prejudices, not to fight against them. Maybe that's why I bring my work back to my body, to my name, to this very personal place. I hope it gives me the possibility of an encounter as human being—with my own specific background, which I fully embrace, but primarily as human being. Maybe being universal means being very local. We all have a body. Being as local as simply 'being in our bodies' is the beginning of universality.’

‘If I dig under my feet—right under my feet, not far—I may reach the groundwater level. You can reach it too, wherever you dig. It's about connecting, not through our ideas, but beneath our feet. It means everyone is grounded. Like trees. Each tree stands in a specific place. Yet they all communicate. The whole forest communicates.’

My Body, My Archive can be seen at Bozar as part of Kunstenfestivaldesarts from May 29th to May 30th (all performances are sold out).