“This kind of standby is not really a passive state of ‘stuckness’: it also generates activity. And this is what these images convey for me.”
‘Suturing the city’ is a vivid image for the kind of attentive, careful but also painful practices which bring a city into existence. It is a specific place of urban becoming, and a particular collaboration from which this urban anthropological photo-book stems: Filip de Boeck has researched Congo’s urban worlds and especially Kinshasa for several decades and repeatedly collaborated with photographers. Sammy Baloji has worked with de Boeck as a photographer on various projects over the years, and his art encompasses other media, such as film and sculpture, extending far beyond the urban as an object. What are the acts of “suturing the city” that de Boeck and Baloji explore with this acute composition of text and photography? And do these acts have a specific temporality?
Alert to anything that might be on “standby”, or that articulates the city as a “promissory assemblage”, Laura Kemmer (Berlin), AbdouMaliq Simone (London/Sheffield), and I (Alexa Färber, Vienna) have looked for scenes in the book where the provisonality yet resoluteness of suturing resonates with the dis-engagement of standing by, and the looseness of urban promises, whether it be ever-at-the-ready pharmacies, watching over potholes, or vigilantly enduring authority over the land.
For better or worse this conversation happened digitally. Although this actually enabled us to meet – living as we do in three different places amidst the Covid-19 pandemic - we accept that the quality of light, sound and recording was not as controllable (or good) as if we had sat around one table. Nevertheless, the format also meant that you could see more than just our hands flipping through the pages of the book. So the digital context made us a little more visually present than the usual setting for talking_photobooks. And thanks to Işıl Karataş’ edits which turned the zoomish film quality into a film-photo-book-essay that we are happy to share with you here.
“Suturing is not necessarily about repair!”
Laura Kemmer says, explaining: ”The suture is always between something as a lack and zero as a number, as one. [...] This is exactly how we defined standby for the issue of ‘ephemera’: as a kind of ‘switch off’ that does not cut connection.”
The pharmacy symbolizes that prospect: available at that moment, in that instantaneity.
In some ways, ironically, the pharmacy is there, standing by for just that extra step which could be taken to ensure a cure or prolongation of wellness, into a different kind of temporality.
“It helps elaborate a notion that is increasingly important to me, which is the notion of accompaniment as opposed to assemblage.”
It’s a very iconic image of aspiration, in the sense that it is an image of crossing over to the other side of the river, or setting out, or almost having arrived. They are not yet there, they have a reason for crossing, and they hope to find something on the other side.
The images of aspiration are not so much destinations in themselves but rather triggers, incitements – simply to look out beyond what one knows and what one expects; to be prepared for that which is in some ways unanticipated.
This is an unfinished building, a kind of bricolage tower, and a project of self made vertical urbanism in the very center of Kinshasa. However, the owner sees this as a building that transcends the city. Promissory things like this tower have superseded human agency. They make their own promises for new forms of urban collectivity.
From Filip de Boeck/Sammy Baloji (2016): Suturing the city. Living together in Congo’s urban worlds. Autograph. Conversation with Laura Kemmer and AbdouMaliq Simone, Berlin, London, Vienna 13.1.2021
We have another series of images that achieves a little distance from the city, where soil and ground is very literally linked to “standing by”, where we have people standing by the plot.
“It’s a kind of spreading out; an extension of households across multiple sites. This raises the issue of how to manage these multiple sites, and the resources necessary in order to do so. And so there is this kind of standing by, this waiting to see and assessing the extent to which the real value of intensive urbanization will come to you, or not.
Those who are photographed somehow get a moment of standing by – of seeing themselves ‘standing-by-the-plot’. A moment of reflection: what is going on here? A stand still or still life. These are very concentrated images.
“This umbrella in the pothole, the firepit inside the cracked asphalt on the side of the street – these are ways of inhabiting: of maintaining brokenness in order for provisional arrangements to remain provisional.”