When Martens is invited to the Tate Modern in London to show his film Enjoy Poverty (2008), he sees the logo of Unilever everywhere on the walls of the museum. This is the starting point for White Cube, a film that shows the power relations between art institutions in the West and the violence of the plantation system.
Many museums are built with the profits extracted from the plantations. This new film tells the story of the unlikely attempt to restructure this chain of value in the art world. After a first futile attempt by Martens himself, a group of plantation workers decides to make art. They unite as the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) and make portraits of river clay, which are reproduced in chocolate by the use of 3D technology.
When plantation worker Matthieu Kasiama travels to New York to open the first solo exhibition of CATPC, newspaper The New York Times calls this exhibition ’the best art of the year’. With the profits of the art show, the plantation workers buy back their land – the very same land where Unilever originally founded Leverville in 1911, and that after over 100 years of monoculture and extraction is completely depleted. Together with environmental activist René Ngongo, they develop a flourishing, inclusive and ecological post-plantation. On this land they built their own ‘white cube’, designed by OMA, to secure and safe guard their future.
We also screen this movie with Dutch subtitles, click here for the showtimes.
Also interesting:
Twelve years after his ground-breaking documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), artist Renzo Martens premieres a new film called White Cube in which he followed Congolese plantation workers who built a museum on a former Unilever plantation to buy back their own land. During this event Martens, the involved Congolese artists and other contemporary thinkers
Een actuele en prachtige film over klimaat-activist Greta Thunberg, die het verhaal achter de bekende nieuwsfeiten vertelt. Een documentaire waar volharding, tragiek en inspiratie op een zeldzame manier samenkomen.
All over the world, people go onto the streets to fight for equality. Is it possible to create a space in which ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality and social background have no influence on the perception of someone’s behaviour?
