Matthieu Kasiama, Mbuku Kimpala and Ced'art Tamasala are members of CATPC (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League), a cooperative of Congolese plantation worker artists who often collaborate with artist Renzo Martens. During the walk & talk, they will give a personal perspective on Ibrahim Mahama's installation Garden of Scars. They know Mahama's work well and together make a strong case for building a solid cultural infrastructure for African communities from the bottom up. In 2022, at CATPC's invitation, Ibrahim Mahama made a monumental installation from burlap bags with which he covered the White Cube.
Over CATPC
CATPC strives to create a form of art that not only symbolically criticises global economic inequality, but actually tries to eliminate it economically. The artworks created by CATPC are exhibited and sold on the international art market. In doing so, CATPC creates a new economic model with the aim of generating capital, visibility and legitimacy for communities of colonised plantation workers. With the income from their art, they buy back their land, developing a new model: the Post Plantation, regenerative agriculture, where the resources are owned by the community. On the first repurchased land, they opened a museum: The White Cube, symbolically situated on Unilever's first palm oil plantation, abandoned by Unilever when the land was completely exhausted after 100 years of monoculture. Here they present their own work and that of others, a programme that aims to decolonise the plantation, which has historically funded the art world.