Location: Venice, Italy
Date: 2026
Programme: Pavilion, Curatorship
Client: Damso Foundation , Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Her Excellency Yolande Elebe Ma Ndembo
Status: Completed
Area: 500 m²
Team: Traumnovelle (architects, curator),
Yala Kisukidi ( Lead curator),
Jean Kamba ( curator),
Aimé Mpané ( curator).
Cindy Teme Makiana ( Commissioner)
Jean-Michel Kalubi ( Assistant Commissioner)
Ines Mwe-Di-Malila ( Assistant Commissioner)
Frédéric Furnelle (Sound Designer)
A.Z.A ( Sound Designer)
Rimasùu ( Graphic Design)
Artists:
Sammy Baloji
Arlette Bashizi
Patrick Bongoy
Damso
Gosette Lubondo
Nelson Makengo
Aimé Mpane
Léonard Pongo
Géraldine Tobé
Photography: Filip Dujardin
The spark is a beginning.
The imperative to create unites nine artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its diaspora in the inaugural pavilion for the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale. The aesthetic installation Seize the Fire! unfolds as a luminous forge where, from Kinshasa’s nights to the streets of Goma, artists dispel obscurity. “Wake up, your nest is of flames. Be worthy, and do not turn your back on it!”, writes Matala Mukadi. To be in flame is to vanish. To be of flames is to sustain a living force. In the pavilion-forge, these verses become a call to kindle a collective fire: of imagination, mutual care and visible and invisible presences that persist, resisting erasure.The installation calls for new stories, which, confronted with contem- porary crises, conjure up discourses of lack, of pain, and of death. They draw their strength from ancient worldviews, radical Congolese im- aginations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Black freedom libraries born in the modern era and in constant dialogue with Africa. The Congo pavilion-forge emerges as a living archive of this contemporary circulation of sensibilities, ideas and imaginaries. Not all flames destroy; many fertilise. In the forge, each individual, by learning to take hold of these flames, commits to transforming the very matter of the world.
Nadia Yala Kisukidi for the MOKO collective
