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Roger Botembe and the Trans-Symbolic
A beautiful woman: everyone will admire her, even with a bad character. And a woman very ugly on the outside, but very beautiful within. With that parable, filmed near the end of his life, the Kinshasa painter Roger Botembe defined the doctrine of his career: judge a painting the way you judge a person, by what it holds, not by its skin. He named the doctrine trans-symbolism, a decade after Baudrillard set down a neighboring word for the opposite idea. Whether he ever knew, the record does not say.
Recent Articles
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Her name was Boali
The photograph exists because a father from Wala decided that his daughter’s limbs should not remain private receipts of the company’s shortfall. He carried them to the house that stood outside the system, the one place that kept records and made images that could leave the forest. What he hoped would follow is not in the record. Everything that did follow belonged to others. He came into the archive carrying the heaviest thing in the world and left it with one sentence. Read more: Her name was Boali
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The Nganga, the Prophet, and the Orchestra
The Europeans in the audience were hearing an African orchestra play European music. The musicians on stage were playing Christian music. I sat between those two sentences for an evening in Kinshasa in November 2022, and have been turning them over ever since. The story of how the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste came to play Rodrigo in a wedding hall runs back to 1706, to a Kongolese woman burned at the stake for preaching in her own language, and forward through a century of a faith the West has never quite known how to hear. Read more: The Nganga, the Prophet, and the Orchestra
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“Pembeni mwa nafsi” by Mihalina Nyota
Mihalina Nyota Buzilu paints vanity with the oldest equipment the theme owns, a mirror and a skull, and makes the arrangement carry her own point: a life that should be welcomed with integrity and gratitude, lost instead to the craving for admiration. In Pembeni mwa nafsi (At the Edge of the Self), the reclining body is painted cold and the skull is warm. In a short video, she explains the vanity, the narcissism, and the death her subjects work to forget. Read more: “Pembeni mwa nafsi” by Mihalina Nyota
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