L' Arbre de l’authenticité

Sammy Baloji, Congolese photographer and visual artist, has long examined the enduring weight of colonialism through image and object, determined to expose its persistent legacy and traces. In his latest work, Baloji turns his lens towards the Congo Basin: his homeland’s largest forest and the second-largest in the world after the Amazon. Opening with a Guardian article detailing the rediscovery of long-lost records, detailing tree growth in the Congo Basin from 1937 to 1958, the film carefully weaves together fragments of Congo past and present. We hear the voices of Paul Panda Farnana, a pioneering Congolese intellectual and agronomist, and Belgian scientist Abiron Beirnaert, before shifting to the perspective of Lileko, a 300-year-old “Tree of Kings”. What does the forest— witness to generations of extraction and erasure—whisper back to us? And what does it mean to render her voice legible, without translation, without violence? Through quiet observation and sonic invocation, the film lets us hear the forest speak, a sound usually buried in the rhythms of human desire and global ecological urgency. Elegiac, unhurried and quietly radical, L’ARBRE DE L’AUTHENTICITÉ resists spectacle; it offers instead a durational politics of reverence. (Hyun Jin Cho)

Sammy Baloji: PUNGULUME (2016, K), RUMBA RULES, NOUVELLES GÉNÉALOGIES (2020, CO-DIRECTOR)