Kongo Astronauts
Web presence
Works
The All-Vibrant
Date
2024, in situ
Material
Mixed Media
Description
Kongo Astronauts is a Kinshasa-based artist collective founded in 2013. The artists create their astronaut suits from e-waste to draw attention to urgent issues facing their homeland. In Congo, violent conflicts are playing out over coltan, a resource mainly mined in the Great Lakes region that is essential for producing smartphones and space technology—which is then returned to the country as electronic waste. The video triptych and three astronaut suits, created on-site at the Völklinger Hütte specifically for the transmedia project The All-Vibrant, point to the transformation of e-waste into art as a reflection on the connection between the capital that powered Europe’s industrialization and the exploitation of people and resources in colonial plantation economies. The artists see this exploitation mirrored in the European mining industry: “These industries relied on the same logic of exploitation that characterized the colonial plantation system, making the extractive practices in the industrial Saar region direct legacies of these intertwined historical processes.”