Banataba - Faustin Linyekula (Kunstenfestivaldesarts)

Somewhere in the storerooms of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a wooden Lengola statuette, deemed to be without value by conservators, takes the Congolese Faustin Linyekula on a journey back to his ancestral village of Banataba. The trip is a symbolic return. It examines the history of this sculpture, removed from its original context during colonisation, with Linyekula’s own trajectory. How can the complex puzzle of his country – now the Democratic Republic of Congo – be put back together when the pieces are scattered all over the West and its major museums? For the Kunstenfestivaldesarts Linyekula takes over the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, still closed for renovations. In the empty wing of the new building alongside the dancer Moya Michael, he tells of this return journey and questions through words and movement the role of the museum as a witness of the dispersal of heritage from other countries. A fiery duet that calls for history to continually be rewritten in the present.