Invisibleville: The Work of Bodys Isek Kingelez

wipimrii T h e W o r k of Bo d y s I se k Kin g e le z Jo u r n al of Co n t em p o r ar y Af r i can Ar t "It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing Only in olo s account was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls ant tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing"1 w towers destined to crumble. Italo Calvino, I n vi s i b l e Ci t i es I n the earl)' night at the end of another endless day of late Ap r il 1997 we could imagine an ailing Mobut u Sese Seko listening - like Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities - to his own Marco Polo, telling stories unlikely to be believed of imaginary cities. Impossible buildings rising in the smoky skyline of a collapsing Kinshasa, a city cracking like a piece of dry mud in the swinging mood of a post- imperial Congo. Mobut u's Marco Polo is Isek Body Kingelez, building with colored scraps from a dysfunctional consumerism his Phantom Ville Ghost City. A metropolis that appears as a post- post Fata Morgana of the late twentieth century. Kingelez's cities are concerned with the fragmentation of the African subject in the afternoon of a post- imperial time, when civil wars and ethnic conflicts do not wet anybody's appetite - either in a frivolous Capitol Hill or in some m olding Kremlin roomas much as they did for the last three decades before becom ing unprofitable nuisances. Of course this is a writer's fantasy, Kingelez's cities would have never appealed to the dictator's taste, obsessed as he was with the graphic rendering of personal power, while on the other hand the artist's vision is very much focused on the individualization of so many different styles as to achieve a kind of structure that will manifest its space in a weird urbanistic dialogue with the symbolic zone created by late entertainment spaces, where political power collapses to make room for economic exploitation. Whet her Phantom Ville means a city whose people are ghosts or a city left empty by fleeing crowds, we do not know. Yet the nervous system of rattling slums is shaken by the presence of this decaying mirage that appears as transmutations of their own building materials, tin cans, cardboard and plastic bags. Clearly Phantom Ville is Kingelez's own vision from the outskirts of Kinshasa where he lives remote and cautiously. As any other miniature model, Kingelez's models are the spatial rendering of the maker's obsessions. Wat ching from his window a collapsing reality the artist dives into the complex syntax of a neo- colonial language based on corrupted and delayed communication. Kingelez looks at history from the wrong side of the telescope. Wh i l e the Futurist architect Sant' Elia was designing cities for a delusional future, proved extremely wrong by Wor ld War I, Kingelez's work goes backwards rewinding a past that could have been a future, proving that reality can be right and impossible at the same time. Then it is unlikely that Kingelez's models would have drawn the attention of a dictator like Mobut u because their glittering surfaces F r a n c e s c o B o n a m i would have made his reflection too unclear, his legacy too thin, his future too scary. Still Phantom Ville could very well be the vision that appears at the dawn of one day in May of 1998 to Laurent Kabila and his temporary Tutsi friends. An ideal city where power was already co n sumed and transformed into the shape of its own habits and vices. A Las Vegas to gamble on the future and guessing about a...