My Body, My Archive / Mamu Tshi, Portrait pour Amandine – Faustin Linyekula

My Body, My Archive

‘What should I tell you about my country?’ Faustin Linyekula poses bluntly with a hint of resignation—as if anticipating a Belgian audience’s expectation on what this could be about. He reveals the tiredness of stories about ‘mud, blood, ruins, dying and people trying their best’, often associated with his birth place, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In My Body, My Archive, the piece that opens the night, Linyekula chooses to recount his search for the disappeared women of his mother´s clan and how he revives them—as bodily reminiscence and in the form of eight carved wooden statues by sculptor Gbaga. His encounters with and within the land of his ancestors are unfolded alongside Heru Shabaka-Ra, musician of the renowned Sun-Ra Arkestra, whose trumpet calls are meant to open the door.

Linyekula welcomes us in the role of storyteller Kabako to the hospitable, almost sacred landscape that the Theaterstudio in DE SINGEL has transformed into. We find the opposite of a depiction of ruin or misery. The smell of the entirely coffee-covered floor is streaming into my nostrils. Recordings of chirping birds and a video projection of grey waters, softly blurred by fog that obscures any sense of place being played. A gesture that shall become emblematic for Kabako throughout the evening: his outstretched arms, indicating and embracing, forming a container and receptor of his surroundings—his fingers like flickering, searching sensors.

“My Body, My Archive embarks on a series of dances, as if only dance can be entrusted with an answer, the body as the last resort.”

How is it possible to be so extensively informed about the male lineage of his family while not even knowing the names of the female relatives who came before him, Kabako asks himself. From there, the performance embarks on a series of dances, as if only dance can be entrusted with an answer, the body as the last resort, and I am reminded of a line from an interview with Linyekula in which he says: ‘My body might not tell the truth but at least it hasn’t lied to me either.’ I wonder if the distrust in the official historiography of the DRC can also be related to a distrust of choreography in the form of fixed and defined movement patterns: the dances seem to be improvised, sometimes like navigators, searching, pointing, referring; other times as if the movement ambushes Linyekula from within, eyes closed or wide open, a sudden hit of a past or present sensation that instantly decides how to dance in the here and now.

There is something absorbed, lost-to-the-world in the way Linyekula and Shabaka-Ra gravitate around each other on the earthy coffee floor. Their pathways only cross in the form of their footprints, not a single glance exchanged, mysteriously connected with something beyond the physical space of the theatre. In the dim light, I too feel thrown back to the sensorial powers of my own body: listening, smelling, sensing. Also image and sound recordings are not strictly used as documentary tools but evoke place and past in ominous ways. What first alludes to the subtle bother of a persevering insect culminates into a horrific soundscape of screams, shots, a helicopter, people in fear for their lives. When I see a teenager playing with a drone in the little park next to where I live that same night, it dawns on me, and I have to swallow: it was never just the almost pleasant buzzing of a fly I had heard. The stories of blood and violence were never entirely gone.

My Body, My Archive is another of Linyekula´s iterations on how to search along the delicate geo-choreography of his native land, and on how to narrate a story of a place and its people without confining their identity. It is also a reflection on how Linyekula himself has chosen to narrate and who he has invited into his artistic collaborations over the past 20 years.

“The central question of the piece hangs in the air unresolved: where are the women?”

The central question of the piece, however, hangs in the air unresolved: where are the women? Regardless of how carefully Linyekula carries the wooden signifiers of his female ancestors in his arms, undoubtedly treating them as soulful objects with feelings of their own, to me they remain absent and ghostly. And I cannot help but noticing the hard-wired alarm bell going off inside me when ideas of women* and object are overlapped.

When the statues are placed in a circle to hold Linyekula’s dance in their middle, when they form a guard of honour, or when they face the audience admonishingly, they only seem to reiterate: ‘Where are we? Where are we? Where are we?’ Other than that, they do not speak and no other female* voice is heard in the recordings, no female* face is seen on the screen. I can only suspect them in Linyekula’s dedicated dances and in his body itself. I leave the Theaterstudio still missing the women, but even more so does Linyekula, I speculate.