Film Screening: ‘Aequare. The Future that Never Was’ with Sammy Baloji
About the event
You are invited to a screening of Aequare. The future that never was, directed by Sammy Baloji, in the UCL East Cinema. Sammy Baloji will join the discussion virtually following the screening.
In this visually compelling film, Baloji explores the intertwined crises of climate change and ecological extractivism in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while tracing the longue durée of colonialism in the region. His speculative gaze interrogates ecological destruction and imagines alternative futures and sublimated archives. This approach is grounded in the concept of lobi—a Lingala word meaning both “past” and “future,” depending on context—insisting on the active presence of the past in shaping the present.
The film swings between archival film clips dating from 1943 and 1957, sourced from INEAC’s colonial propaganda, and 21st century captures of the same Yangambi premises, like a pendulum that never moves time forwards. An acronym for the former National Institute for the Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, its post-colonial successor, the Institut national pour l’Etude et la Recherche Agronomique (INERA), is on film so suffused with past, colonial “coordinate systems” that the present looks inert and at a standstill, as if held hostage by frames of knowledge that refuse to abdicate.
Decades after decolonisation, that persistent hold is made explicit by an imposing and intact map of the Belgian Congo hung high on the wall, and by all the remaining rusty machines, labelled test tubes and rotting reports and specimens, dusty instruments of measure, and laboratories. Against the crumbling of these infrastructures, a devoted population of Congolese clerks seem to assist the preservation of the collected data and methods, in a choreography of gestures that the montage reveals to be inherited from the colonial decades. Amidst images of farmers burning trees to make the charcoal sold at surrounding markets, or those of clerks’ motivational posts proudly professing the exactitude of their pursuit, the atavism of colonial ecology seems apparent.
Excerpt from: Sandrine Colard, From The Equator, I Have Seen The Future Aequare. The future that never was, was created in the framework of the Venice Biennale di Architettura 2023, Venice.
About the artist
Sammy Baloji (b. 1978, Lubumbashi, DR Congo) lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. Since 2005, he has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His practice investigates the cultural, architectural, and industrial heritage of the Katanga region while critically examining the impact of Belgian colonization.Baloji’s work engages contemporary societies as cautionary landscapes, highlighting how colonial clichés continue to shape collective memory—enabling social and political power structures to dictate human behavior.
