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Choreographies of the Everyday

Fluctuating Images

There are different ways to describe the workings of a Megalopolis and the chosen metaphors highlight different aspects of city life, from the urban battleground to the more (an)organic association of the concrete jungle, or the altogether fruity Big Apple. Whatever attitude is taken towards the metropolis, one feature will always be the specific choreography that emerges from it. A choreography involving all kinds of fluxes and movements of people, objects, data, and ideas, produced by a constant process of negotiation on all levels of daily life.

The very conditions of Kinshasa as a rather young structure founded under colonial rule and based on colonial ideas are still defining moments of its choreographic threads, never completely overwritten, supplemented by newer developments. The interweaving of the city’s daily dances can be described as a creative process that produces the intricate tissue of life at Kinshasa.

This screening presents some of these choreographies of the everyday in a choice of music videos and documentary films. The process of negotiating movement in and through the city as well as the access to and disposal of material are recurring themes in them. And so is the negotiation of participation in and access to different strata of this choreographic tissue that is the life in Kinshasa. One strong focus of the programme is the aspect of gender, with Céline Banza singing about the female body, the dancers in Ofele transgressing normative cis-gender definitions of the body, and Bénédicte in Zero braving all obstacles to become a singer in her own right.
Behind the screening lies another form of choreographic negotiation: the collaboration between Peter Miyalu, a young filmmaker from Kinshasa, and fluctuating images from Berlin. Without Peter’s insight into the inner workings of the creative Kinshasa choreographies, this programme would simply not have been possible.

Curated by Cornelia Lund (fluctuating images, Berlin/University of the Arts Bremen) and Holger Lund (fluctuating images, Berlin/DHBW Ravensburg) in collaboration with Peter Miyalu (Académie des Beaux Arts, Kinshasa).

Films:
La danse du matin, Director: Peter Miyalu, 2019, 2 min
Bidon Vil, Director: Nizar Saleh, 2018, 4 min
Ofele, Director: Nizar Saleh, Music: Pierre Kwenders & Uproot Andy, 2021, 3 min
Te rembi, Director: Nizar Saleh, Music: Céline Banza, 2019, 3:40 min
GangstaF*cknB*tch (Bana Mabe), Director: ANDER Concept, Music: Lunatic Beudo, 2015, 4 min
Zero, Director: Moimi Wezam, 2018, 66 min

fluctuating images (Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund)

fluctuating images is an independent and non-commercial platform for the presentation of and reflection on (media) art and design run by Cornelia und Holger Lund. Its aim is to foster a fruitful exchange between aesthetic and discursive approaches to the multilayered challenges presented by our technology- and media-driven world from a global and decolonial perspective.

 

Cornelia Lund is a Berlin-based art, film and media scholar and curator. She has worked for years in research and teaching, mainly on documentary and audiovisual artistic practices, design theory, and de- and postcolonial theories. 2012–2018 she has been a research fellow in a DFG project on German documentary cinema (University of Hamburg), recently she co-curated Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design (Berlin 2019), and since 2021, she is a Research Fellow at the University of the Arts Bremen.

Holger Lund works as an art, design, and music researcher and as a curator and DJ. Since 2011, he is professor of media design, applied art, and design studies at the DHBW Ravensburg. He also runs the music label Global Pop First Wave dedicated to non-Western pop history, especially Turkish pop music of the 1960s and 1970s.

Since 2004, they both run the independent and non-commercial media art platform fluctuating images. Current curatorial research project: Turkish Pop Music Images.