Genetic Bomb is an interrogation of blackness, diaspora and identity that I have been conceptually developing for many years. This interrogation has evolved into a photography series that I have worked on from the beginning of 2022 and that I shot in November and December 2022 in Congo (DRC). My own life and experiences have inspired me to take this project from concept to artistic creation.

 

I was born in Kinshasa, DRC and moved with my parents to Belgium when I was two years old. Like many people who have experienced similar emigrations, I carry generational guilt, confusion and disenchantment. Guilt of being a chosen one, one who was granted the opportunity to escape poverty, insecurity and war that colonialism created. Confusion stemming from the realization that the warmth, love and energy of my family’s native land could never be replaced, no matter where we went. And disenchantment from realizing the place we grew up upheld, and continues to uphold, racism and white

supremacy directed against us. These realizations raised several questions.

 

How are we supposed to come together with our homeland? How can we embrace our roots and at the same time live in a system that is poisoning them? How can we love if we are a product of hate? Are we doomed to reproduce the same colonial patterns or do we have the ingredients within ourselves to

create a change... a GENETIC BOMB.

 

I imagined a visual fantasy where these questions could be answered through dreams, colours and sensations. Where the answers don’t need to be explained and where the obvious remains mysterious.

 

Genetic Bomb also mobilize the ancient concept of intergenerational conflict where a generation needs to explode another to exist. I really think it’s a fantasy, and that different generations can live together in peace. But in a patriarchal colonial supremacist system, this peace is always questioned or challenged.

 

 

The project I divided in four segments.

 

WASHED OUT, a reflexion about how Black people are taught to hate themselves and wash their culture away. That’s why I created gradients in some character’s clothing to show that their true colour is slowly fading away. 

Colonialism works like narcissism. What the colonizer will value about the colonized will always be their own image, nothing else. This is the reason why I covered some character’s face and body with mirrors to show that narcissism but also the impossibility for the colonized to be seen in their singularity by both the colonizer and other colonized.

 

STRING THEORY, a reflexion about how our societies develop nostalgia as a political tool. Through the medium of religions and traditions, our western societies create instituions that are constantly trying to depict the past as more colourful than it actually was, washing out all the suffering and brutality on the most marginalized. 

In my visual I placed colourful strings in front of people’s face. These people become blind by the colours of the past. Incapable to see their own misery and incapable to apprehend the present and the future.

 

TOXIC PATTERNS, a reflexion about the toxic patterns of patriarchy applied on women. Congo region has not always been Christian or Muslim. Before that, the family dynamic wasn’t always patriarchal. Patriarchy has been mainly imported from colonial countries.

I also draw the parallel with the wax, the famous fabric that most of the women in the Congo wear. That fabric has nothing to do with the Congo because it is designed and produced in The Netherlands. I play with the words “Toxic Patterns” in two different ways.

 

TALKABOUT, a reflexion about the difficulty of freshly graduated teenagers to imagine possibilities about their future. In the Congo, the unemployment rate is skyrocketing and teenagers have no perspective.