Matanga
Guelord Vulu
Experimental video, dance
Popular culture in the city of Kinshasa is rich and protean. It is born, grows and generally dies out. One of the strong manifestations, or one of the settings in which this nebula manifests itself or is staged, is funerals. During them, in Kinshasa, families mobilise and respect a set of codes established by the community. In this city, which is a melting pot of several of the country’s cultures, customary practices mix and give rise to an almost homogenous funeral vision that is typically Kinshasa. This video, in which the two dancers are staged to music with a funeral scene, relates the acts, stages and main lines of this ceremony; its variations, its importance, the solemn stages and the respect of established codes demonstrating how much the traditional, in this cosmopolitan megalopolis, and the modern have homogenised to create new ways of conceiving death. Places and moments of weeping and joy, reunions, disputes, love affairs, atmosphere, alcohol, ostentation, influences, influence peddling; funerals are here taken in an artistic approach, by these artists, highlighting them through the mixture of video art, contemporary dance, sound, etc.
Guelord Vulu was born in 1989 and lives and works in Kinshasa. He has a State degree (Baccalauréat 2006-200) in commerce. At the Jant-Bi école du sable in Senegal, with the famous dancer Germaine Acogny, described as the mother of contemporary African dance, he was able to complete an internship in traditional and contemporary professional African dance in 2011.
With this rich experience, he has gone through almost all the stages that make up the history of hip-hop dance in DR Congo. Founder of the dance group ART-CON in 2003 and multiple champion of Kinshasa in the urban dance competitions “Mudjansa”, he focuses his work on young hip-hop talents and creates emotionally rich performances. He has reworked all the techniques of hip-hop dance to challenge them.