Sven Augustijnen

Imbéciles de tous les pays unissez-vous!

magazines in glass case, 2018

Assistance: Frédéric Uytenhoeve
With the support of CCStrombeek
Courtesy: the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels

Fifty years after his assassination, Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo, is back to haunt Belgium. Through commemorations and encounters, the top-ranking Belgian civil servant who was in Elisabethville on that tragic day of 17 January 1961 attempts to exorcise the ghosts of the past. To the sound of St John Passion by J.S. Bach, Spectres immerses us into one of the darkest days of the decolonisation of the Belgian Congo. An examination of the biopolitical body, this feature-length film by Sven Augustijnen exposes the fine line separating legitimisation and historiography and the traumatic issue of responsibility and debt.

Imbéciles de tous les pays unissez-vous! is an installation based on a large collection of Europe Magazine, which aims to trace the fate of the Belgian rifle FN FAL during the Cold War (it was used in the fight against communism as ‘the right arm of the free world’). The installation has multiple functions: revisiting the era of decolonization and neocolonialism, and by taking the postwar period as a mirror of our condition, analyzing how the militarization of our society goes hand in hand with the racist discourse of the right and the undermining of democracy and policy making.