LEAP Seminar @UdeM (2024/04/03): Research in situation: But where is the knowledge on traditional architecture in Central Kongo (Democratic Republic of Congo)?

Date: April 3rd, 2024, 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Location: Room 2064, Faculté de l’aménagement, Université de Montréal

Seminar presented by Judith le Maire, professor at the La Cambre Horta Faculty of Architecture at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and director of CLARA – Centre des Laboratoires Associés pour la Recherche en Architecture and the Clara journal, accompanied by Professor Victor Brunfaut.

Description

Visits to architectural archives from the colonial and contemporary periods will help us to understand how they are classified and inventoried. The LEAP and CCA centers visited will enable us to determine and discuss epistemologically the specificities of architectural archiving. The architectural archive is founded on a paradox: the impossibility of archiving buildings on a 1:1 scale necessitates mediation due to their scale, drawings, models, objects with a cryptic status…

The decolonization of archives and the question of their restitution and my research projects imply an ethical and reflexive positioning. This relates to my research object, named by V.Y.Mudimbe “the colonial library”, which brings together all the documents archived by the colonizers in the Congo and brought back to Belgium. Thinking about the archiving of post-colonial or pre-colonial (traditional) architecture, reflecting on its reception, omission or restitution is usefully done by comparison, for example with Canadian institutions at the forefront of these issues. The aim is to submit a PDR in July with colleagues from ULB’s Faculty of Architecture, and then to be able to propose a G3 project.

Our faculty is strongly positioned in the research and doctoral training of students from North Africa, Benin and the Congo. For this reason, their research training and management requires reflection that goes well beyond Belgian borders, and indicates this research in innovative institutions on these subjects.

I’m looking for traces of traditional Congolese architecture, a vernacular architecture that has been depreciated to the point where it is today unknown, unstudied and unhistoriographed. Where, for example, is Kongo architecture to be found in the archives of Belgian explorers in the Congo? Prince Albert of Belgium, for example, stayed in the Congo and made virtually no mention of the traditional buildings or villages he visited. His archives and the archives of the Belgian state nevertheless contain numerous traces and representations of traditional Congolese architecture from the early 20th century.