“Photography arrived in Congo, or even in Africa, through colonial expeditions and photography helped a lot to create this image of ‘the other’ or ‘the savage’ or ‘the foreigner’ or something like that. I wonder myself, as an African, or as a Congolese, how am I able to produce a new narrative with the same medium?” says Baloji. He went to one of the mining office to get archival images, which “became like testimonies and witnesses of what happened during the colonial time.”

In his series Mémoire (2006), Sammy Baloji overlays archival pictures of Congolese people on his own contemporary photographs of mining infrastructure in ruin. His photomontages highlight an ongoing history of exploitation, prosperity, and decline. In each image, Baloji joins two views of the same landscape, a visual metaphor for the spaces and peoples scarred by colonialism and the impact of globalization. In one image, we see prisoners in chains carrying pieces of wood near an abandoned railroad, while another image shows a man standing in the middle of two giant mining structures.

Sammy Baloji was born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region, rich in minerals such as copper, cobalt and uranium, was exploited by Belgian colonial powers, authoritarian governments and private companies for more than a century. Following a decline in the 1990s, the mining industry has returned to meet the global demand for coltan, a mineral used in electronics manufacturing.