HORTA SIMULATION
Traumnovelle
Congolisation
What is the Congolese presence in Belgium today? It is from this question that the
installation Congolization (2023) was born. When protests erupted all over the West
after the murder of George Floyd, people started to demand the decolonization of the
urban. Statues were identified as the main symbols of this order. They were
commented on, criticized, and sometimes spectacularly taken down. Yet architecture
has remained, at least in Belgium, a space shielded from criticism. A wall is just a
wall, right? A wall is never just a wall. A wall embodies a cultural project that always
has a political agenda.
Exploring the archives of CIVA, we encountered the pavilions that were built by
Belgian architects aiming to show Congo at different international, universal, and
colonial fairs and exhibitions. This is where the journey of Congolization began. From
this journey through the archives, the answer to the question of how to identify
Congolese culture and style in Belgium’s architectural history appears obvious. What
to do with this knowledge, however, is uncertain. Congolization aims to share these
materials with the hopes of redirecting the question of representation to more
meaningful investigations about the built environment. Heritage is a precious tool
that can be used to better society.
The Pavilion as Speculative Space
Everything is fiction: our world is a collective cultural construction. We need to beaware of this construction as a way to continue to build on it or to destroy it, or be
part of it, to be able to write new ones. Form follows fictions and pavilions are the
outposts of fictions. They are built as thresholds between what is already there and
what could happen. Pavilions are laboratories that propagate ideas into mainstream
culture, and the Congolese pavilions that were built by Belgian architects should be
seen as such.
Architecture as Means for Economy
From 1885 until 1958, the timeframe of our research, the economic and imperialagenda behind the organization of all the fairs is written in black ink. Architecture is
used as propaganda to sell goods. At the time of the 1929 world economic crisis,
imperialism was a governmental project and colonies represented a new hope for
investment—new wealth, new opportunities, new dreams. The archival materials
related to international pavilions report the names of the products that were for sale.
The architects’ task was to shape the appropriate box for encouraging the sale of
colonial goods.
Construction of a Nation
In 1885 in Antwerp, the first world’s fair that took place in Belgium, the Congolesepeople were presented to the public in what was later known as the “human zoo.”
King Massala and his entourage were invited a few months after King Leopold II was
granted sovereign rule of Congo at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. In 1897,
Leopold II asked architects and artists to not only showcase wood and ivory, but to
transform the material into new unexplored objects. The international exposition of
that year, which took place in Tervuren, just outside of Brussels, marked the official
announcement of Art Nouveau, which at the time was also called Style Congo. As
Leopold II said, in order to be recognized, the young nation-state of Belgium needed
its colony and, in another context, that history would do him justice.
The Archive as Weapon: How to Look Back in Order to Move Forward
Looking back through the archive is also a means to look forward. History is a
construction that reshapes itself based on new elements and new actors, dead or
alive. It seems more crucial than ever that we look at our past through new eyes and
with new agendas. Congo is not a faraway land; it’s a central part of Belgian
architectural history. Its materials, its clients, its agenda, and its archival presence
have built Belgium.
Spatial Construction and Reading History Again
Architecture always has an agenda. It is in that way that we developed the spatialinstallation Congolisation to address the Congolese presence in Belgian architecture.
Hoping to share more questions than answers. The installation is an attempt to
recreate the experience of CIVA’s archive: a grid system with voids allows the eyes
to cross through time, which reveals new links. We sought to keep the mediation
elements as light as possible so that viewers can also make new links; can create
their own stories based on a selected archival materials. The installation materializes
a timeline in which visitors can wander in the direction of their choice. Perhaps,
slowly discovering that the end is uncannily similar to the beginning.
Conclusion: There Is No Answer to a Good Question
Through the identification of the different proposals made by Belgian Congolese
architects throughout history, we can see clearly that there isn’t a correct answer to a
bad question. A box to sell colonial goods might be made of gold or wood, yet it
remains in the imperial logic of exploitation. Some old voices have tried to address
the issues behind these pavilions—for instance, the counter-pamphlet (and later an
exhibition) published in 1931 by Surrealist artists against the 1931 Paris Colonial
Exposition in Paris that demanded, in bold font, “Don’t visit the colonial exhibition.”
We hope that our archival contribution might open a new field of study into the built
environment and allow walls to talk. The Congolese presence has contaminated
Belgian architecture, as inspiration for the modern movement, offering new
references to Art Nouveau reveries but also through certain of the pavilions that are
still hidden in plain sight in the Belgian environment. Georges Hobé’s pavilion built
for the 1897 exhibition, for example, long served as an outdoor barbecue space at
the Royal Museum for Central Africa, or the Carillon, a brewery designed in Tournai
by Henry Lacoste at the same time that he was building Belgium’s pavilion for the
Paris Colonial Exposition and on whose floors and walls he used Congolese motifs
of his own creation. We could also think about the Panorama du Congo (1913)
painted by Alfred Bastien and Paul Mathieu for the Gent International Exposition,
now held captive in a military barrack of Ypres. A former pavilion of the 1958
Brussels World's Fair is today used as a garage for used car retailers along the
Brussels Canal, or the pavilion built by Lacoste in Paris in 1931 is available for rent
with this promising catchphrase: “If you are looking for an unusual location for your
events and business meetings, the Belgian Congo Pavilion immediately plunges its
guests into an exotic universe by taking them to the site in a 4 × 4. African musicians
and dancers can, if you wish, punctuate your feasts with local colors: bison,crocodile
or ostrich meat on the barbecue. A real change of scenery in the Parc de la Rocq.”
The exhibition is not over.