UCLA

In October of 2010 the second iteration of the Lubumbashi arts biennial, Rencontres Picha, took the city as its stage. This paper examines how the biennial unified theories of memory and mapping via an artistic commentary on Lubumbashi’s past and present as capital of the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the first section of this paper I take a phenomenological approach to memory to explain how the lived experience of the biennial was itself an act of remembering. Next I provide a brief overview of the history of Lubumbashi, which celebrated the centennial of its founding in 2010. With this history in mind, one can understand how the act of walking through the city grounded the artistic event in a specific place and history. Through the interactions between bodies, works of art, memory and places, the curators and visitors can be seen as participating in an act of mapping, in fact remapping new meanings onto the preexisting grid of Lubumbashi. Finally, with the decision to call the presentation of works of art a “biennial” (rather than a festival or exhibition), its creators placed Lubumbashi on a global art map of biennials.