Historians Reflect on Visualizing the Past in Kinshasa

by Pedro Monaville, Cécile Michel and Sapin Makengele

Filmmaker Cécile Michel, popular painter Sapin Makengele, and historian Pedro Monaville will reflect on their collaboration in 2010 and 2011 around The Phantoms of Lovanium, a documentary film about the memory of state violence in Congo-Kinshasa. The film follows Makengele as he produced a painting on the University of Kinshasa’s campus. The painting represented events from the violent history of the Congolese student movement in the 1960s and 1970S and drew inspiration from photographs from the period. While Makengele was painting, students, professors, market women and other campus dwellers conglomerated around his easel and started to talk about the past and present of state violence. Their testimonies and conversations about uncompleted collective mourning constitute the film’s major material. Using clips from the film, Michel, Makengele and Monaville will each highlight a specific aspect of the project. They will talk about crossing their respective practices, the historical context for the film, the effects produced by the filmed performance, and visualizing the past.