Artistic residency: Pamela Tulizo

In recent years, ongoing debates about the restitution of cultural heritage objects that were stolen within various colonial contexts have gained momentum in tandem with a general awareness about the prevalence of various social injustices throughout society.

THE AFTERLIVES OF OBJECTS 
Regarding Decoloniality and the Afterlife of Cultural Heritage Objects

With The Afterlives of Objects we seek to inquire and interrogate publicly with and among different stakeholders, communities, artists and activist initiatives about the possibility of redress and awareness.
As part of the project, the Goethe-Institut and the Brussels project space Enough Room for Space invite the Congolese artist Pamela Tulizo to Brussels. For four weeks, the artist will work on her photographic project, which renegotiates the iconography of the African woman throughout history by reinventing her representation in order to give the image of the African woman the strength she deserves. In the context of the artistic residency, Pamela Tulizo will be invited to interact with the archive of the Institute of Colonial Culture (ICC) - Research on Congolese Heritage project in Enough Room for Space.

 

Pamela Tulizo (Goma, 1993) is a trained journalist and artistic photographer who runs the cultural project space Tulizo Elle Space for women and girls in Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Photography is one of the lines of communication she uses to enter into a dialogue with her community and the world. Her artistic work has won several awards and been exhibited internationally, including a.o. in Belgium, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Institute of Colonial Culture (ICC) - Research on Congolese Heritage
ICC consists of a collection of artefacts, documents, books, photographs, and films representing colonial presence in Congo, mainly focusing on the period 1884-1960. There is hardly any tangible material left in Congo of that period, due to the hastily departure of most colonisers after the independence in 1960. ICC is an institute, existing separately but hosted in DR Congo by the National Museum in Lubumbashi and in Belgium by Enough Room for Space, that creates a permanent archive of objects, clothes, letters, photo's, audio and video recordings, books and documents representing colonial culture. Or put differently, the daily life and work of white European colonists in the colonial period.
The aim is to remedy a void in the collection of the National Museum, but also the public knowledge about the colonial period, both in Belgium and DR Congo, by creating an archive of colonial culture, the first of its kind in DR Congo. By doing so, it facilitates a more egalitarian writing of history, where the dominant ethnographic western view towards colonisation and African cultures in general, is reversed. ICC puts western culture under an 'African microscope' by using material and documentation from both colonisers and colonised. Both researchers and artists are invited to work with this extraordinary archive and thus slowly initiate a recontextualisation of the entire material.