The past is another planet; so is the present. We're on a spaceship orbiting both. Someday when we land, we may have forgotten where we started, and where we belong.

“The Past is Another Planet” uses photos and reflections from a trip I took in 2016 to Lubumbashi, DRC, a city in the Katanga region and the site of massive copper and cobalt mining operations in Congo’s most resource-rich province.

It was secessionist groups from Katanga, with material and tactical support from Belgian, British and American politicians, spies, and operatives, who took part in the torture and execution of Patrice Lumumba in Lubumbashi in 1961.

Later, the city became the site of Gecamines, a massive state-run mining operation that employed around 40,000 people at its height and ran schools, hospitals, and the infrastructure of the city. Due to a host of factors including corruption, mismanagement, and economic liberalization, Gecamines all but shut down, leaving the city a hollowed shell of its former prosperity.

This photographic installation addresses the idea that the past can be conceptualised as a location, a psychic space that mirrors or contrasts with the present in revealing, sometimes troubling, ways. Some of the photos show historical images that were printed in a Gecamines publication and were meant to show projections of what post-colonial modernity would look like. The photos of Lubumbashi today show the ways in which those dreams and visions of the future did or did not materialise.

The photos are displayed as snapshots, small photographs hung on scrap metal that could evoke a fragment of space shuttle, or the metal roofing of a city dwelling, or the curvature of space/time itself. The chair and helmet provide a viewing point where viewers can sit and take in these photos, imagining they are traveling in orbit between two planets - that of the past and that of the present.

Installation with digital photographs, metal sheeting, helmet, aluminum labels, and plastic

Otherworldly, Nafasi Art Space, Dar es Salaam,
Group Exhibition, September 2019