Research & Art : TRACER

From October 5th to 19th, Wetsi Gallery will be home to TRACER, an artistic research project that takes a critical look at the 1956 spectacle 'Changwe Yetu'.

'Changwe Yetu' (Our Celebration) was an impressive collection of Congolese, Rwandan and Burundian dance and music acts, commissioned by the former Belgian Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, with a double agenda: to entertain local workers in Congo and idealize colonialist policies towards the outside world.

The performance and an accompanying ‘making-of’ film were directed by Jean-Marc Landier, uncle of one of TRACER’s artists, Sarah van Lamsweerde. After his death, a 3-metre-high décor piece, created for the show by Congolese artist Mwenze Kipwanga, remained in the family. Sarah invited an interdisciplinary group (Emmanuelle Nsunda, Emily Hardick, Esther Mugambi, Nizar Saleh and Anne Wetsi Mpoma) to revisit this production through a performative and discursive research that asks whether this work can still produce meaning or value today.

Between 1956 and 1958, thousands of spectators in Congo and Belgium saw ‘Changwe Yetu’. Now, in a reverse travelogue, the group follows Mwenze's décor piece back from Belgium to DR Congo, with stops in the form of creative residencies in Brussels, Antwerp and Lubumbashi, reanimating the set piece with polyphonic and decolonial perspectives.

The events at Wetsi Gallery mark the end of the first phase of this project. Mwenze’s vibrant piece will be the center of an audiovisual installation, activated with performance, lecture, meditation and discussion, inspired by the group’s multifarious experiences and hopefully fueled by a great range of audience contributions.