Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (CATPC) representatives Ced’art Tamasala and Matthieu Kasiama present their radical ‘Balot NFT’. Mobilizing the magic of the NFT, CATPC aims to reclaim the powers of a long-lost sculpture and regain control over their community’s land. The artists will describe their request for a loan of the Balot sculpture from Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, for an exhibition in their White Cube in Lusanga, Congo. They will discuss the Balot NFT, with which they hope to unleash the sculpture’s forces, to buy back land, replant the forest, providing autonomy and food security for workers in one of most impoverished areas of the world.
Conversation in French, with French and automatic subtitles, please select preferred language in captions settings.
Ced’art Tamasala, artist, CATPC
Matthieu Kasiama, artist, CATPC
Moderator: Balz Andrea Alter, curator, lecturer and anthropologist
Matthieu Kasiama (Lusanga, 1987) and Ced’art Tamasala (Likasi, 1986) are members of CATPC, – or ‘Congolese Plantation Workers Art League’, an art cooperative of plantation workers in Lusanga, D.R. Congo. Founded in 2014 CATPC, has built a practice of reclaiming hundreds of acres of former plantation land for future generations with the proceeds of their art. On that land, they established ecological and inclusive food gardens, while in the midst of that land they built a museum, the White Cube, which aims to return capital, visibility and legitimization, so that plantation worker communities can also decolonize. In 2017, the New York Times named their first solo show ‘the most challenging show of the year’. CATPC is preparing a solo show for the Vanabbemuseum in 2023.
Balz Andrea Alter (Switzerland,1980) studied Economy and Science of Religion in Basel and Visual Anthropology in Zurich and Aarhus. In 2006 Alter founded ‘E 3600 scientific artworks’, an association to catalyze transformative processes by (re)searching synergies in the social fields of the arts and sciences. For ‘E 3600’ he realized a trilogy on a collaborative long term filmic research process (In a Whiteman’s Kontri, 2007, Europaland, 2010 and Moi, un Afropéen, 2017), to finally defend this work in 2021 as ‘a cotutelle de thèse’ at the University of Basel. He lives and works between Freiburg, Basel and Zurich.
The Art Basel 2022 Conversations program is curated by Emily Butler.
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