David Cross: Thank you for taking time to speak about the work of Waza Art Collective. An aspect of contemporary art, perhaps exemplified by the ‘white cube’, creates an enclave, ostensibly distanced or separated from politics and society. Conversely, Waza’s transnational organization, its ability to move between languages, to support intercultural interaction and engage with people who may not be in art practice but developing common spaces, opens up multiple possibilities… I believe the meaning of ‘Waza’ is ‘imagination’, is that right?

Feza Kayungu: Absolutely. So, a bit of history about Waza. It was founded in 2010; in 2020 or 2021, after COVID-19, I joined Waza through the Power to the Commons project, which introduced me to a lot of other practices of Waza.

Waza is located in Lubumbashi, the second-largest city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), within Katanga Province—one of the richest regions in deposits of copper, cobalt, and uranium. The province’s development has long been built around mining activities in Lubumbashi, Likasi, Kambove, and Kolwezi. Gécamines was established during the Belgian colonial period to regulate these mining operations, particularly in Lubumbashi, Likasi, and Kambove. Lubumbashi became the central hub of activity, as the main offices of Gécamines are based there. Waza is situated not far from these offices, near one of Gécamines’ most emblematic ruins—the chimney.

D. C.: Was that chimney mining infrastructure for processing minerals or was it the heating for the town? What was the chimney for?

F. K.: It was about processing the ore so it could be shipped to European countries, especially Belgium. Waza is in the neighborhood of Gécamines’ processing facilities, which are no longer working. They’ve become part of artistic expression now; most artists, photographers, even some performers go there, because those facilities have become a kind of inspiration, part of the language.

Before I joined Waza they were working on, ‘Waza Kazi 2.0’[note]‘Kazi’ in Swahili means paid work or employment.[/note] which initiated the Baraza[note]A Baraza is a council for co-generating knowledge. Waza interprets the concept as a ‘public program encouraging cultural empowerment through artistic production.’[/note] and led to the very interesting book by Daniela Waldburger about the Gécamines mining workers who were hit by the crisis when everything shut.[note]Daniela Waldburger, « C’était bien à l’époque mais l’avenir iko sombre »: Negotiating Nostalgia with and among Ex-Mineworkers in Lubumbashi (DRC), Leiden Koninklijke: Brill BV, 2025.[/note] 

Since it’s a whole network, when Gécamines lost its assets and mining was privatized, the railroad companies also stopped. A lot of people lost their jobs—not only those from Gécamines, but also people working for the railroad companies, especially men—and many families found themselves in a very bad situation. So, memories of the time when the mine was active have become part of a nostalgia that people are constantly trying to negotiate.

What is important is how people reacted when they were told to go. There is this phrase, ‘départs volontaires’ — the company asked people to leave ‘willingly’ because it was no longer able to pay them. People say, ‘We remember when we were working in the mines and all the facilities and benefits we got from mining. Now maybe if we go into artisanal mining, we’ll be able to get back what we lost.’ There are about two million artisanal miners working in the D.R. Congo[note]Artisanal Mining Database: https://artisanalmining.org/InventoryData/doku.php/country:congo_drc (Accessed 14 April 2026)[/note], and for them this is a nostalgic negotiation, but also a kind of cruel optimism.

Why cruel optimism? Because people still think that if mining rises again, prosperity will rise with it. Cruel optimism is a term coined by Lauren Berlant[note]Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.[/note] to describe that sneaky hope that pushes people to cling onto something that sounds great but actually wrecks their life in the end, like artisanal miners chasing the ‘good life’ through extractivism, only to get trapped in toxic debt, violence, death, and environmental ruin that keeps real thriving just out of reach.

Is it true that mining will provide prosperity? I don’t think so, because everything has collapsed; there is no way back. And I don’t think it helps people to believe that artisanal mining is going to help them regain agency or earn enough money. When private investors come in, they bring their own engineers and only hire people who are highly qualified, maybe 10 people out of 100. All these people studying mining, hoping to be hired, are not hired. Yet people still think that working in the mining industry is beneficial and well paid. Although that might be true for a small number of people, the overall situation is a huge problem.

So Waza initiated those Baraza workshop moments where people talked about how Gécamines was like a father. It becomes very personal when someone says, ‘Gécamines is like a father and a mother to me.’ But now you no longer have any trace, any benefit, any hope, because your ‘father’ and your ‘mother’ are no longer there. All of a sudden, you’re just exposed, on your own. Gécamines had that paternalistic policy, which is connected to Belgian paternalistic politics in Congo. People could not move from that system to a life where they had to face all these mining-related situations alone.

The atmosphere was deeply emotional during those Baraza moments, as people reminisced about a time when wages were consistent, and families had access to free healthcare, education, and various amenities. The mine effectively sustained the city then, but its sudden decline transformed that prosperity into a matter of memory. I grew up hearing many speak of that period with admiration.

Within the mining communities there are many shared practices—ways people help each other and organize everyday life. These are a lot of things explored in Daniela Waldburger’s book.

D. C.: A recent meeting of the London Mining Network looked at critical minerals in Peru, where a multinational mining corporation is expanding its operation, claiming to act responsibly according to environment, social and governance principles. There, artisanal miners aspire to be like the corporation, even though the corporation blames artisanal mining for contamination of the water. So, it’s a relationship of uneasy identification. It’s not about supporting the community and making it economically viable. It’s extractivism: taking the minerals for the wealthy consumers in the Global North.

F. K.: That’s exactly the word: extractivism, and we’re fighting with it. That’s why I spoke of literature that has provided me with the discourse and speech to critically engage with extractivism. When I read a book like, King Leopold’s Ghost[note]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Boston: Mariner Books, 1998.[/note] and, Congo Inc. by In Koli Jean Bofane which mentions the 1884-5 Berlin conference, in which Otto von Bismarck said, ‘The new state of Congo is destined to become one of the most important enforcers of the work we intend to accomplish’[note]German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck at the closing of the Berlin Conference, February 1885. Quoted in, In Koli Jean Bofane, Congo, Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, trans. Marjolijn De Jager, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018, p. vii (Dedication).[/note], I was like, oh, so that’s how it started. It’s just so personal now because when I read that closing statement of Bismarck, and I think of Heart of Darkness in relation to how the Congo has been opened widely for extractivism, I understand why just thinking about the politics today is not enough. It’s crucial to think in terms of an institutional politics which has been there for years, and which was established to serve other people. And to go back to the roots, because the roots are strong, so strong that the architecture of the cities, the infrastructure, like the Lobito corridor[note]The Lobito Corridor is a major trade route linking Angola’s Lobito port to the mining regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia.[/note], which was started last year, connect the Congo to the external world for mining commerce.

D. C.: One of the presenters at the London Mining Network symposium showed how in Peru a pipeline has been built to transport minerals suspended in liquified clay from the copper mine to the coast, where ships arrive to take the minerals away. It’s not really a port in the sense of a place of trade as a two-way exchange. It’s an extraction point. Some might say that these are matters of economics and politics or engineering, not really the proper territory of art practice. But that’s why what Waza does is so interesting. Your location is part of the context for your cultural production, and the communities you engage with have historically experienced these phenomena. You’re not just looking at the issues in an abstract way—it’s living memory.

F. K.: Absolutely. And now getting into the project itself, we collaborate with people from Latin America, on a project exploring non-extractivist museum practices. That came with the restitution era, which asked, ‘We are getting things back, but how do those things come back in the community? Do we make the same mistake of just getting them back to the museum which was established by the institutions which took those things? We wanted to have those objects in dialogue, in conversation with the owners, most especially people from those ethnicities who those things were taken from. We wanted those people to educate us, to tell us what they think and how these objects will be reinscribed in their communities. The project focused on three objects from three ethnicities from the Museum of Antwerp and engaged in conversation and dialogue around some other artworks that the museum was planning to return.

D. C.: Was there any idea of returning the millions of tons of copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel?

F. K.: Oh, no, that is impossible. Impossible! Politics is so messed up when it comes to mining, you just don’t think about it.

D. C.: But you have created a situation where it is possible to ask questions which previously have remained unasked. Do you view this as art practice or as curatorial practice, or are those artificial Eurocentric distinctions? How would you frame it?

F. K.: It’s art practice, but also, we think of decolonial practices as a way of distinguishing what was done, what was built and what we’re trying to build. A curatorial project that we did was called Kirata, a term whose genealogy is from ‘curator’. People would say Kirata is closer to the Congolese context; it is not necessarily someone who went to university and had long studies in curatorial practices, but someone who knows the artwork and who is an art practitioner. It could be someone like me—I did not do curatorial studies, but I have been into the art worlds, and I can connect an artist with another artist and with the global artistic community based on the experience of working on that project, and in that Art Centre. It could also be someone who is into the media, who collaborates with artistic practitioners, other institutions globally. In that informal connection and relationship between the art and the artist, the Kirata is someone who knows, who has been there for a long time, who has experiences they can exchange. Over two years we held workshops connecting artists to other artists, to other curators, to other arts practitioners, people who do not necessarily identify as curators, but who know how things are in academia and the art world. So, it’s very decolonial and a way of centering local voices and local practices, because most of the time people who used to curate in the Congo were from the Western world. How could we create a network and a platform, where we create art which speaks to the communities to reclaim agency? People need to know and understand our works as artists, as part of their communities. Having taken a step towards decolonization, we can come back to the same communities and create art which talks to them, and not only to the Western world.

D. C.: That’s wonderful: you started by speaking about the infrastructure of the mine, which was built not to serve the interests of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the colonialist extractivist apparatus. And then you talked about curating as a decolonial practice. Somewhere between the physical structure of the mine, and the cultural decolonial practice of engaging with people, helping them find a sense of agency, is the apparatus of the art world which is not exactly extractivist like a mine. But neither is it decolonial—it’s there to represent Eurocentric views and to make the West feel good about itself, to imagine itself as a place of democracy, and cultural exchange based on the idea of the autonomous artist and the gallery as a space of disinterested contemplation. How much of that notional art world is still of some value and how much do you need to get away from it to be truly decolonial in the practice of Kirata?

F. K.: That’s very interesting because finance connects it so closely to the Western world. A lot of funding comes from Europe or the United States. When you don’t have money, you end up doing things that don’t really align with your practices, just to meet the criteria of funding calls.

Kirata was a place to reflect on how artists can empower themselves but also create art that’s economically beneficial—because we also have to live. It’s not like you can just dive into activism if you need to make a living from your art. So, we started thinking about the economy of arts, the media economy, the networks—essentially, how to sell, how to collaborate with local and global galleries.

But there’s a long way to go, because the country’s politics are still very colonial. It’s hard for them to accept that art is part of the decolonization discourse. We have a Ministry of Art and Culture, but they don’t provide much funding, not like UNESCO, the European Union, or the Goethe Institute, for example.

D. C.: Considering the limits of the commons: we want to grow commons, to be more resilient and able to share ideas and resources and practices, but at certain points that aim comes up against the power of the media, the financial system, the corporation, the state. The ability to build the commons is limited by the combined forces of state formation and capital accumulation. When the government either helps you on terms and conditions or refuses to help because you don’t align with its agenda, what do you do? Have you found it necessary to alter what you do to secure the resources, support or favourable coverage that you need?

F. K.: I was working at Waza when funding came through for the Kirata project. The funding criteria were straightforward—they weren’t overly prescriptive, but the funders were genuinely interested in our decolonial approach, which was fantastic because it aligned perfectly with our principles and the project’s goals.

Since Kirata wrapped up, the center has been navigating a series of smaller projects within the city. For example, we partnered with Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on an arts project developing dialogues and conversations during elections in remote areas, most specifically for youth.

We’re also working on a project with funding from the King Baudouin Foundation (KBF) of Belgium. It brings together a selection from the 7000 paintings, ceramics and art objects from Katanga. Our goal is to establish these works in the museum.

After the Belgian Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, Katanga attempted to secede from the rest of the country. During this period, many people were forced to leave the Katanga region. As Gécamines shut down, much of the art was left behind or sold off by people who needed resources to return to their home provinces. Léon Verbeek, a Belgian Catholic priest, worked with the artist Mwewa to collect these paintings; this collaboration is reflected in the project’s title, Verbeek–Mwewa. We want people to see these archives of the history of Katanga.

We always do our best to align our planning with our principles. So that’s how our practice started to have a sense of the common. Artists come to Waza for easy and free access to the space and facilities: we have a web radio, a music studio, a library, and a common space. But how do those interactions help Waza grow or get financial support? In the project, Power to the Commons, when I worked as an artist, one of the principles that we learned from the community was, ‘Ujamaa’[note]‘Ujamaa’ is a Swahili term for ‘familyhood’ or ‘extended family’, central to Julius Nyerere's vision of African socialism in Tanzania. The phrase frames it as communalism adapted to African traditions, emphasizing collective self-reliance over individualism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujamaa[/note], ‘le communautarisme à l’africaine’—sharing as a family, community or society. Another principle is, ‘Tsheba Tshanyi, which means ‘what is mine is yours’. In Congolese sociality, idioms like ‘Kyako Kyangu’ (« ce qui est à moi est à toi »), ‘what belongs to me belongs to you’—capture an ethic of interhuman solidarity that binds communities through reciprocal sharing, rendering individual property relational and contingent.

If what’s mine is yours, then how will you and I get equal benefit of what we share? We started to have conversations with artists around the ecosystem. It’s like mutual construction, mutual economic practices.

D. C.: In capitalism, the buyer gets the commodity and the seller gets the money in more or less the same moment. A buyer may order something, but the seller doesn’t dispatch the goods until they’ve been paid for, whether with cash or credit. So there’s a link between value and timing. With the commons, do you have a delay in time, like allowing artists to use your facilities, on condition that they give you something of equal value, at some point? How do you relate the value of what you give to what you take?

F. K.: It’s a practice which is emerging… I don’t know if it has really become practicable yet. There is a delay to be honest, but when somebody benefits from Waza, it should be their responsibility to say, ‘I can’t just be there and take and not give back’. During our discursive workshops with artists, we asked—what does this mean to you? What do you think your role should be here? How can you give back, like bringing a project or an opportunity for Waza? When we sell your artwork or raise your profile, how does your gain benefit us? We weren’t paid for those workshops, but people were giving brilliant ideas.

D. C.: In a relationship like friendship or family, if someone you trust needs something, you give it to them, and don’t ask when they will repay you; there’s an unspoken understanding that balance will somehow be restored in the future. This implicit, flexible reciprocity contrasts with relations under capitalism where there’s no trust; each material exchange is a transaction explicitly set in time and space. Would it be fair to say that commoning at Waza combines the flexibility of friendship or kinship with the explicitness of professional or business transactions? If so, is it Waza’s discursive approach that makes this combination possible?

F. K.: I’ll say more about trust, but also more about where you start from. If you started from Waza, you should think about how you identify yourself. I am here in the USA, no longer working in Waza, but I still belong—I am a member of Waza. If you go away, the belonging relationship that you have with Waza is part of your contribution. When people go, we don’t expect them to always speak about Waza. But as part of the community, there may be an opportunity to promote the Waza name. Besides, belonging to a structure is important for networking; giving credit to where you come from can really help to move forward, meeting her huge network of artists. Waza has already built its own ecosystem and identity beyond Lubumbashi and outside the Congo at international art events.

So it’s not a directly spoken agreement, more a practice of trust and belonging, a mutual construction in which, as an artist, you identify with the network.       

D. C.: That sounds amazing. An art institute might use a network to enhance its reputation and concentrate its power. But what you’re talking about is more like a set of principles or values that could spread anywhere. You could go to Belgium and meet with an organization that was formerly part of the colonial apparatus, and your decolonial values could open the way to historical understanding.

In this time of social struggle and ecological collapse, I’m interested in the relationship between the art world and the worlds of finance, production, and trade. Could Waza link with the mining communities in Peru, for example? Is there common cause with people outside the art world, but with whom your artistic practices could extend mutual understanding?

F. K.: I think so. We’re working with people from Colombia who are part of the Arts Collaboratory (AC) network, which is widely open to the Global South countries, including people from Indonesia, Lebanon, Uganda, Mali, Palestine, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, and from Latin America: Bolivia, Colombia, and Costa Rica.

D. C.: I’m planning to interview key people from Architects for Gaza, who are envisioning the rebuilding of Gaza as a collective practice of self-determination. Although that now seems like a distant dream, they are keeping alive a sense of possibility. And the London Mining Network, which links communities in Colombia, Peru, and South Africa. The point is to share experiences of the divisive effects of the material, political and financial systems of capitalism, and to develop the potential for art practices which can move transversally, to resist or evade and perhaps delegitimate those forces by building common cause. You’re already doing that. Is there a pattern to it?

F. K.: There is a resonance. I think the Arts Collaboratory is one of the strongest networks developing a pattern. To think in terms of the commons is to recognize that we have the same problem, such as is embodied in the mining structure, and the political and colonial history. But the way we resist is different because of geography — while aware of the situation in Latin America and Asia, Waza is in Central Africa, building links through the Arts Collaboratory with countries like Uganda, Senegal, even Egypt.

We have similar projects, but we also host gatherings. For example, in 2023, we explored solidarity as a theme, discussing wars between and within countries—like those in Mali and the DRC. I believe the AC network is a powerful way for artistic creation to dismantle power structures: when we learn from each other, we empower one another and build a different kind of resistance that carries more profound meaning. AC truly embodies commoning and imagines other worlds. We've held teach-ins to share insights from these practices—for instance, Waza's participation in Senegal's Afropixel events showed us how, despite our different geographies, we can name shared problems and the practices we want to pursue together. It fosters a world where we speak a common language about diverse issues, sparking commoning practices like cluster gatherings focused on solidarity.

D. C.: In London, large parts of the art world are still very individualistic, though there are independent artist-run spaces, and collaborative practices have been awarded art prizes. Being accepted into the art world seems to require that you set politics aside, which leaves art as distanced, or separated from the conflicts and struggles of the world. Your vision, of connecting with people whose experience might be very different, and finding common ground with them, is powerful. Do you think cultural practices of expression and exchange could go beyond an abstract idea of solidarity into something more tangible, or even practical?

F. K.: We shift from individualism to the common, where solidarity becomes a kind of discipline and a means of mutual support. Commoning practices take on a transformative role, as our practical approaches weave solidarity together with dynamic processes and interactions around resources. We might, for example, learn from how the association Kër Thiossane has developed Afropixel in Senegal and adapted aspects of their community-engaged practices to our own context. In this way, commoning becomes central to our approach. It encourages us to think in terms of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’: in the current world, thinking only in terms ‘I’ is rarely meaningful, whereas bringing many voices together gives each voice greater strength.

D. C.: I really like that. I was brought up in a white, English, male environment, which was implicitly sexist, racist and colonialist, though I didn’t realize it at the time. At school, the hidden curriculum[note]See for example Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), New York, NY: Continuum, 2000.[/note] shaped my thinking in terms of ‘I’, the competitive individual. With prizes and punishment, the unspoken question was always, ‘are you on the side of power or are you marginalized?’ My identity formation was an experience of social domination—but from the dominant side. Many years later, it was being part of an art school which practices critique, a cosmopolitan community including people of color who’ve practiced decolonial patterns of thought, that began freeing me from the singular identity that was inculcated in me. So I admire your work!

F. K.: One project that Waza has been working on was green colonialism, a term coined by Guillaume Blanc.[note]Guillaume Blanc, The Invention of Green Colonialism, trans. Helen Morrison, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022.[/note] This project engaged with how people have been displaced from their land in the name of wildlife conservation. Eurocentric conservation practices raise questions of who should and who shouldn’t stay, and who established that order of questions that are interwoven with layers of colonial power and hierarchy.

In my personal work, I've been reading literature on the creation of Virunga Park, which is one of the oldest in Africa, created in 1925. The way it was created pushed back communities to establish a scientific project to study mountain gorillas and to study indigenous communities, such as the Batwa or Mbuti people in Congo. I don’t like this term, but they called them pygmies. Waza worked on a project, « Le Retour des Fantômes » (‘The Ghosts Are Returning’ [2020]). In this project, artists from Switzerland, Germany and Congo collaborated around the return of seven human skeletons, which had been taken from the community of Mbuti in the 1950’s by a medical doctor from Switzerland to the University of Geneva for scientific experimentation.

Going back to the creation of the Virunga Park, I started to establish the connection between ‘pygmy,’ better the Batwa or the Mbuti people, being victims, and their portrayal as a species to be studied; not seen as fully human. And how the colonial discourse has continuously shaped their lives. Today not only the Mbuti people, but all the communities who live on the land have been suffering from that hierarchy, with European colonizers equating the indigenous people with ‘nature’ as a pretext for stealing their land. People with those racist ideologies came to our lands and they mined and they destroyed the ecosystem. But you still come with that idea that you should protect all this stuff.

D. C.: The contradiction and hypocrisy are intolerable!

F. K.: Absolutely. When I was in New York, my performance tackled that very idea. I asked a question: Who gets to claim that those people—meaning us, right? —are a danger to nature and shouldn't be there? We've inhabited these lands for generations without ever building cars or engaging in extractive mining. Yet it's a classic colonial tactic: climate change gets pinned on local communities far more than on those who arrive with their machines to plunder the earth.

D. C.: It’s deforestation as well in the Congo. I’m developing an art project based on a piece of tropical timber that I bought for £20 from a junk shop near where I live. To identify it, I sent a sample to the laboratory of the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, who reported that it comes from central and western Africa, quite possibly the Congo. Looking at their historic archive it’s clear that documenting the forests and the wild species in them was not about nature conservation, but about timber extraction, and commodities for the Western consumer. The botanical study as an instrument of colonialism. Maybe it’s time this piece of wood went back to where it was stolen from…

F. K.: The communities we work with ask questions that reveal something important: when you return things, the return itself is the process. Restoring dignity to those who have been dispossessed is incredibly hard, because the way these objects were taken was not dignified. The return process must consider how deeply these objects are charged with meaning. After being taken away for so long, they still carry the story of violence. Sometimes that story is collective, and sometimes it is deeply personal.

But another question emerges: what do the people themselves think about these objects? In many of the communities we work with, people say that when these objects were taken, they were kept in places that did not allow them to be alive. So, in a way, they are now dead. When you bring them back, what are we supposed to do with them? How do you reconnect with objects after such a long separation?

The Mbuti community said something very clear: we do not need those skeletons anymore. What we need you to bring back is the knife and the chair of one of our kings. You took the skeletons to Switzerland, and now by bringing them back to Congo, it feels like you are simply trying to bury those bones. For us, it is like bringing back a curse to the community.

D. C.: Really?

F. K.: Yes, because they were exhumed. It’s so sad when you learn that local people were hired to exhume the skeletons and to separate the flesh from the bones. I’m sorry—this is a very sensitive matter. It raises difficult questions: what is humanity? Who is considered more human, and who is not? How could a whole human body be reduced to an object of science? And this is only one case. There have been many other instances where so-called ‘research’ was carried out on people’s bodies.

This is why I remain open to discussing restitution with communities and their elders—listening to what they think, not only about the return of an object, but also about the return of its history and dignity.

D. C.: In the Western mind, restitution is often about giving back stolen goods. I’ve proposed that the crown of the King of England should be broken up, and the diamonds stolen from Africa and looted from India should be given back. We should give the gold and gems back and say we’re sorry. But it’s not just about the material, is it? It’s about the lives ruined. How can we atone for such insult and injustice? Perhaps through the principles of truth and reconciliation that Nelson Mandela put forward as a process of healing after apartheid—reconciling justice, as a function of the state, with the imperative of rebuilding common humanity. If healing from historical trauma including apartheid and colonialism is even possible, perhaps justice is not enough; what’s also needed is a process of cultural transformation. That’s why I admire the work you’ve been doing; I think Waza has reached for a deeper process of understanding, expanding the question outwards from the object towards the relationship.

F. K.: Yes, there is that. Similarly, climate change and the competition for critical minerals raises a huge complex of issues. There are practices which are trying to tackle the issues of mining, because mining in the Congo, especially in the Katanga region where I grew up is so… I don’t know which words can describe it. People are being displaced from their houses, from their lands because the government believes that the land should be sold to be mined. This is 2025, not 1985, yet we have the same cycle of history repeating. The mining corporations only care about what they think should be extracted and how they’re going to benefit. Art is a language that we can use to speak and to raise attention, also scholarship. I’m studying Heart of Darkness, and other colonial literature which portrays the Congo history as entangled with violence. If we do not look at that today, then in my opinion, all Africa is going to sink. It’s just huge to see how a country is portrayed as a source of materials, rather than a place where human lives are established. When that’s the only narrative, it is so sad.

D. C.: It’s nastier than that. The history of British foreign policy as its empire collapsed is one of creating divisions and breaking the process of decolonization, of implanting dictators and supporting them with weapons and finance from London. The Bandung Conference in 1955 rejected the Cold War binary of capitalism or communism, and gave the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America hope of self-determination and emancipation from colonialism. But that’s been deliberately undermined through bribery and blackmail and corruption, which then gets blamed on Africa. And yet many people in the ‘advanced economies’ don’t really want to know. They seem content with the easy idea of Africa as a place for resources.

Waza is showing that cultural production can open up a more subtle and informed process of questioning… I wonder why the government hasn’t stopped you, because you’re challenging the established view with new stories and new understandings.

F. K.: We don’t engage too much with the politics, we just make it very cultural and critical, because engaging directly with the politics will only mess you up. Power, as Achille Mbembe has shown, is necropolitics.[note]Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.[/note] To confront power is to risk death. You have to make it more critical and artistically oriented so that people can grasp what it means, more than attacking the power itself.

D. C.: I’ve been overtly political in my institution: I have used my privilege as a white English male to demand that my university stop depositing the students’ fees with a bank which is financing nuclear weapons and weapons being used on Gaza. But the struggle is toxic. In contrast, the combination of artistic practice, critique and communing that you describe is like fresh air, it’s a beautiful way of being effective in the world.

F. K.: In the end it’s just resistance. Digital media and platforms provide spaces where people can think together, so the exchange moves from one place to another, like me coming from the Congo to New York City and telling people that how the Western worlds think of nature is completely different from how we people from the Global South think of nature: we don’t name it, we live in it.

D. C.: Do you think you will absorb the Western way of thinking—of splitting nature from culture? Do you find yourself adopting the language and the ideas of the people around you, or are you able to hold on to your cultural identity and your heritage and push back?

F. K.: I didn’t spend much time in New York City. But being in the United States has opened my mind to the way I think about politics, and especially about technical capitalism. I’ve been learning about racism and about how society has been historically constructed.

I’m studying at a more liberal university, where most things are open to discussion. It is a space that allows you to think beyond texts and ideas. I also learn a lot from attending conferences where people discuss power, biopolitics, and necropolitics. Being exposed to literature as a form of resistance—against environmental destruction and imperialism—has also been very influential.

All of these experiences have deeply shaped me. Back home, I could not easily see these connections. Some of the intellectual resources simply are not available in my country, for historical reasons that persist today. So you have to address power carefully—by reaching people’s minds and shifting perspectives, without directly confronting power itself.

When you try to tell people that mining will never truly develop the country, they respond: ‘The country is always portrayed as poor. But we still have the resources.’ When a city or a country positions itself primarily as open to mining and extractive industries, it rarely gets the opportunity to develop in other ways. Instead, it becomes caught in a cycle of depletion—one that eventually becomes entrenched not only in the economy, but also in people’s perceptions of what the country is and what it can become. In the United States, national identity is rarely tied to mining in the same way. It is more often associated with technology, invention, and scientific progress.

D. C.: That’s a good point—there are multiple models of development: Even within the linear model of the so-called ‘advanced economies’ there are different sectors of extraction, processing, manufacturing, distribution, trade and then finance. To over-identify with one part risks cutting yourself off from the other parts. But the extractivist is the least sustainable part of all. When a mine runs out, it leaves people with dead rivers, contaminated soil and a blazing climate. People need fresh forests, and streams flowing with clean water, to drink and grow crops with on a healthy soil. And yet mining is projected to massively expand to meet the consumer societies’ insatiable demand for minerals.

F. K.: The renewed momentum around the Lobito Corridor reflects this broader context of global strategic interests. It has gained attention partly as the world seeks solutions to global warming. However, it comes with a lot of geopolitical context between powerful countries.

D. C.: This sounds fascinating and should be helpful in making sense of the fragments that I’m seeing from the Western perspective here in London.

F. K.: To relate extractivism and climate change to the commons means understanding how people connect, interact, and face their situation together. But how do we resist? I don’t know. That’s a huge question. Because people die—just two weeks ago, artisanal miners in the DRC were not allowing some big companies to get into the mining, because they were so angry that hundreds of their fellow miners had died in a mining accident.

Another book, Cobalt Red[note]Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2023.[/note] by Siddharth Kara investigates the ordeals of artisanal mining communities in the Congo. Some critics[note]See for example Sarah Katz-Lavigne and Espérant Mwishamali Lukob’s review in Open Democracy, July 2023, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/cobalt-red-siddharth-kara-democratic-r… that Kara positioned the Congolese in the way that Conrad did in Heart of Darkness. But we always write from our own perspectives; narrating the history of a country can never be neutral. Historical narratives are never fully neutral. The author himself auto-censored his interview asserting that it sounded like a Sino-Indian perspective.

D. C.: A key feature of the commons is their capacity to accommodate different perspectives, but how far does that capacity extend? I’m intrigued to hear you refer to Heart of Darkness. Thirty years ago, I was drawn to the aesthetic power of Conrad’s prose and the complex ambiguity of his narratives, which show the protagonists’ characters and actions to be both driven and constrained by the forces of colonialism. But as Chinua Achebe showed, ‘Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth.’[note]Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,’ Massachusetts Review, vol. 57, No. 1, Spring 2016, p. 14-27.[/note]

You’ve spoken of Waza’s work mobilising the potential of art for restitution and reconciliation after historic injustice, and for building common cause between struggles around the world. As the social-ecological crisis deepens divisions, do you see artistic commoning becoming more aligned with specific projects such as anti-racism or decolonization, or with general values such as equality, reciprocity, or conviviality?

F. K: Artistic commoning, as practiced at Waza, operates at the intersection of situated political struggle and durable ethical commitments. It links concrete projects—decolonization, anti-racism, restitution—to enduring values of equality, reciprocity, and conviviality. Our restitution work, including the return of Mbuti skeletal remains and Katanga’s Verbeek–Mwewa paintings, directly confronts the material and epistemic violences of colonial extraction. These gestures are not merely symbolic; they contest what Frantz Fanon described as the colonial production of the human hierarchy, where Black bodies are rendered objects, specimens, or labouring matter rather than political subjects. Restitution thus becomes a rehumanizing act: a refusal of the colonial order that continues to structure memory, property, and representation.

At the same time, Kirata curating and Baraza workshops cultivate relational infrastructures of trust—what the Tsheba Tshanyi principle calls reciprocal presence—across communities fractured by the collapse of Gécamines and the extractivist afterlives now rebranded as a green transition. In these post-extractivist landscapes, artistic commoning functions as both method and horizon: repairing social fabric while prefiguring alternative modes of collective life.

As social–ecological crises intensify, this dual alignment gains urgency. Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics clarifies how late capitalism governs through exposure to death—whether through abandoned mining towns, racialized dispossession, or sacrificial zones of mineral extraction. Decolonial action dismantles extractivist hierarchies, yet without convivial networks it risks isolation. Through translocal solidarities such as Arts Collaboratory—linking Congo with other developing countries, artistic commoning builds infrastructures of mutual care that exceed individualism and nationalist enclosure.

Rather than confronting power solely through direct antagonism, these networks erode necropolitical logics by sustaining life-affirming ecologies of reciprocity. In Fanonian terms, they participate in the ongoing invention of a ‘new humanity’; in Mbembe’s vocabulary, they insist on the right to breathe, to repair, and to flourish beyond extraction.

Artistic commoning, then, is not simply resistance. It is the patient construction of relational sovereignty, a decolonial conviviality that reconfigures the political system from below while imagining solidarity as an enduring practice rather than a fleeting event.

 

This interview was conducted on 6 December 2025 and was edited for clarity and succinctness.