belgian pavilion at the 9th biennale international architecture exhibition 2004 ....................................................................................................................
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9th international architecture exhibition in venice, italy, 2004 / belgian pavilion ‘kinshasa, the imaginary city’ curators: filip de boeck and koen van synghel photography and videos: marie-françoise plissart (the belgian pavillion Biennale Venice won the golden lion) can a city exist without architecture? and what is architecture? how modern is modernity? how universal is urban planning? can urbanity be immaterial? which urban visions does it rely on then? these are the questions at the heart of kinshasa, the imaginary city. as the former capital of belgian congo, kinshasa occupies an important place in the history of belgian architecture and urbanism. today kinshasa has become a postcolonial african city, where alternative modernities are generated and new local and global identities forged. with the exhibition, the curators intend to stimulate the ongoing debate on the contemporary central-african urban scape. it is a specific urban reality which invites us to question and rethink the classic urban paradigms. in western discourses and reflections on how to plan, engineer, sanitize and transform the urban site and its public spaces architecture has been given a prominent place. it is, almost naturally, viewed as an indispensable dimension for the creation of an urban identity. indeed, one can hardly underestimate the importance of the built form and of the material infrastructure if one wants to understand the ways the urban space unfolds and designs itself. however, in a city such as kinshasa, the infrastructure is of a very specific kind. its functioning is punctuated by constant breakdown, by failure and by absence. the exhibition is not, therefore, solely focusing on the city’s material infrastructure or the urban colonial legacy. rather, it comments upon kinshasa’s urbanity, which exists beyond the city’s architecture. the city’s main infrastructural unit is the human body. body-building and sape (the corporeal aesthetics which is so typical for kinshasa) are amongst the most meaningful activities in the urban space. in a very real sense, the body is kinshasa’s only ‘building’ that is constantly constructed and perfected. the social relations between the more than six million urban dwellers generate an impressive sense of collectivity. kinshasa’s inhabitants quite literally embody the market, the street, the garage, the church... more importantly, even, these bodies form the locus of much of the invisible modalities of urban action. they moor the city’s urban imaginaries, revealing its existence beyond the city’s visible geographical and physical reality the imaginary city relies on anthropological insights. the exhibition and accompanying book result from the intensive collaboration between anthropologist Filip De Boeck, photographer/filmmaker marie-françoise plissart and architect/curator koen van synghel. in 2000, after many years of field research in kinshasa, de boeck met plissart at her first kinshasa exhibition. --- back to the biennale participating countries index page --- ------- monthly designboom newsletter ------- ------- ? comments and contact us ? -------	kinshasa video installation TV images TV images