My night at the museum. Christoph Boltanski talks about his immersion at the African Museum

For King Kasaiwritten as part of Éditions Stock’s Ma nuit au Musée collection, Christophe Boltanski chose to stay near Brussels in Tervuren, once the site of the Royal Museum of Central Africa (i.e. the former showcase of Leopold’s Belgian colonial project. II, which has been renovated and revised becoming the Museum of Africa).

The writer spent the night in front of one of the symbols of the place, King Kasa, a huge stuffed white elephant captured from the museum in 1956 during a zoological expedition. This lonely old man, who had been left out of his herd, and had followed him for weeks, sent him back to him, as he remarks not without humour; He inquired about the person who had hunted the magnificent animal, and found that the latter and his family, the Bekkhats, were closely connected with the history of the Belgian Congo.

Using the hunter’s trajectory as a common thread, the author The Life of Jacob also call In the heart of darknessKonrad that Tintin in the Congo, by Hergé (who cleared himself of the racism that permeated the album, insisting that it reflected only the contents of the Tervuren museum, his primary source of documentation). And signs a moving book that questions the colonial question and the roots of the world we live in as elegantly as it does profoundly.

In the video: a trailer for Machos Alpha, a Spanish series from Netflix about the deconstruction of men

Madame Figaro . – Why did you choose this museum?
Christoph Boltanski. – Ten years ago I visited it before it was renovated for another book, set in a mine in the Congo. Blood ores. It is the former museum of the Belgian Congo, and at independence the Belgians especially confiscated the mining archives. It had been left in its own juice since its opening in 1910, and when I learned that it had been closed for “decolonization” (I quote) work, my interest was piqued. I also spent the night there in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Many unworthy statues were targeted in the USA, but also in France, Belgium… While they melted into street furniture, when no one paid any more attention to them, they paradoxically came back to life. Should they have been hidden, re-contextualized, changed? These questions interested me.

After all, this night is also what the Martinique psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon calls the “colonial night,” which gave its title to Achille Mbembe’s book; Coming off a big night. But I literally came from that colonial night; my parents met at a FLN support group in Algeria and after a police operation they had to go into hiding for a few weeks and that’s when I got pregnant. I always say that I owe my life to the Department of Territorial Control…

You call too fast In the heart of darkness , by Joseph Conrad. Have you also had the desire to go to the “heart of darkness”?
Yes! The point of museums is to offer a journey (when the Quai Branly opened, for example, they offered you a passport) and I immediately thought of Marlowe’s journey in search of Kurtz, thinking that my own Kurtz, the hunter, had shot. King of Kasa. The museum necessarily represents the world, which perhaps teaches us more about ourselves than about others. The African Museum is, after all, a metacomic that reflects our history in relation to the fact of colonialism, this huge thing that we have a very hard time digesting. I wanted to tell how he tries to cling to this past, sometimes successfully, sometimes clumsily, sometimes sweetening (or even denying) reality, sometimes showing courage…

You specifically describe the works currently on display in the museum as “compensation” commissioned by contemporary artists. Do you think your book is one too?
It would be too ambitious, but it is certain that this project of “decolonization” of the museum raises the question of renovation. Until now we were transforming. In Paris, the Colonial Museum became the Museum of African and Oceanic Art, then the Museum of Immigration, and we moved the collections to a new location that we now call Quai Branly. It has been turned into a fine art museum, given that art is like money and that it has no smell, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. He would not have a past either, so we got rid of the problem. But another possibility was never considered: creating a colonial museum. We have museums on all sorts of periods and subjects, from customs to railways, but no museum of colonial history, while the western world was built on top of it (or attached to it anyway). The idea is scary because the company can be described as a vocist, but we have to face this story…

The text ends with this ode: “For the Christian”. Does he also want to pay tribute? Christian Boltanskiyour uncle?
Yes, because he died in the meantime and because I discovered museums with him. I also think his work addresses a central theme King Kasai turned his back on the anonymous person and disappeared. He connects with ghosts, and that’s what I take from him, the need to reclaim the identities of forgotten people. The Congolese are not present as such, but they seem superimposed to me, as in the last scene of the book. I was passing through this corridor when the names of Sambo, Zao, Ekia, Pemba, Kitukwa, Mibange, Peta appeared; seven Congolese brought as trophies to be shown at the 1897 International Exhibition where King Leopold II wanted; promote what he called “his share of the African pie”. Then they died and were buried outside the museum. In one of the commissioned works within the framework of the reopening of the museum, their names were projected, on which were placed the only ones respected until then, the Belgians who fell during the occupation of the Congo, on which it was written. wall, while the Congolese were otherwise massive, fortified.

You were talking about cups. this goes to another topic King Kasai the hunt…
Most of the objects in the museum were cups. They have changed status over the years, becoming collectibles, scientific objects, works of art. I evoke a fetish that was hijacked by the adventurer not for aesthetic or ethnological reasons, but because he knew that this object gave power, and that by stealing that power he would deprive those who love it. It was the goal of conquest, war. the animals shown were also hunting trophies. Colonization is a long process with several stages, but the first one is like a hunt to me. It can be adjusted later, but remains hunting…

Does this hunt continue today?
I greatly admire the mind of Bruno Latour. In We have never been modern, he recounts his experience as a collaborator in Cote d’Ivoire, which deeply influenced his philosophy, noting that we continue to talk to him about coming to bring modernity to Cote d’Ivoire without anyone knowing what include this term. . The West was built on the exploitation of these men and women, these lands and their resources. And we have reached the end of this operation. The issue of climate, which for me is closely related to this colonial history, is another reason to revisit this history.