Facets of migration. Voluntary or suffered. Hope, living in the expectation of a certain or uncertain outcome. To take its dash towards the springboard of a desired future, but at what price? Succession of concessions, there is no ambition which is carried out without sweat or sacrifices. Each incision on the back of these curved silhouettes is a pain that builds a woman, a man. From the shadow springs the light. The stature of the creations presented here is an allegory of dignity, the one with which every life path, every aspiration and every being should be accomplished.

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Quebec, land of welcome, at the price of work. A life of labor, adaptation and learning with the aim of integration. Eldorado. Promises of better days. In the face of all these stories, the story of Isidore Bakanja surfaces. Young Congolese, converted to Catholicism at the beginning of the colonial era, his self-sacrifice, his resilience, his devotion to the word of God and its transmission, will have had the better of him. Bakanja, in the irreproachability of his colonized behavior, and in his evangelical elevation, reminds us that the gift of self, the will to surpass oneself and to put on a good show, does not guarantee better days.

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In this Other Station, Nkembo Moswala proposes a return to the past, a stop in the present and a leap towards the future by revealing a wardrobe that prepares us for displacement. Interior displacement, displacement of the body, displacement of dreams. These outfits on which idols are fixed are next to reverence, acts of idolatry and subjugation. To take the ways of immigration or to engage towards the unknown, the uncertainty is a course of faith, a way of the cross for some. One's gaze is directed towards the people one has left behind, one's ambition and choices resolutely turned towards the future, and the reality of the present sometimes made of disillusions. In the service of a homeland, an economy, an ideology with which newcomers and/or foreign workers seek to identify, their devotion can become a pretext for all sorts of abuses.

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These abuses can be seen in the artist's representations where notions of power, idolatry, submission and emancipation are intertwined to erect the most imposing of silhouettes. The process, Nzoloko, an ancestral incision technique that means scarification in Lingala, is applied to large costumes dominating the room. They thus take on a divine aura that invites contemplation. The four pieces that make up “In the skin of Isidore Bakanja” challenge all conventions of adaptation and put the garment into perspective as an object of worship and adoration/valuation, and as an indicator of social presence.

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This installation, in its scope, technicality and purpose, navigates between the harsh and violent nature of human relationships in a context of displacement and labor, and the quest for stability and dignity of any person aspiring to a future outside of their land, their culture. The artist's technique, which incises to let the light in, and the ambivalence of faith coupled with devotion or idolatry, testify to this in-between. It is at the crossroads of the many spiritual and religious symbols, and the acts visible in these monumental works, that one feels in the skin of Isidore Bakanja. A posture that seems forever irreconcilable but that Nkembo Moswala invites us to sublimate, just like Patrice Lumumba before him: "Neither brutality, nor abuse, nor torture have ever led me to ask for mercy, because I prefer to die with my head held high, my faith unshakeable and my deep trust in the destiny of my country, rather than live in submission and contempt for sacred principles.                                                                                                                                                   

                                         - Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi -

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