Artist: Sammy Baloji

Title: Raccord #1: Cité de Kawama

Date: 2012, printed 2015

Medium: Inkjet print

Dimensions: 33 x 95 ½ x 2 in.

Credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Collection Council Fund purchase, 2025.26. Image copyright of the artist.

Sammy Baloji’s diptych Raccord numéro un (#1): Cité de Kawama, invites viewers to consider how images shape our desires. The diptych’s expansive scale, stretching nearly eight feet across, amplifies the visual and conceptual tensions between its two panels. It also brings to the viewer’s attention the extractive systems behind the conveniences and luxuries of contemporary life that often remain invisible. Baloji’s photographic diptych addresses urgent issues, including labor precarity, consumer culture, environmental degradation, and the uneven distribution of wealth generated by the extraction of natural resources.

Born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Baloji has devoted much of his artistic practice to exploring the colonial histories and social landscapes of his home region, particularly the mineral-rich Katanga province. He lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels, producing photographs, films, and installations that interrogate memory, identity, and the lasting impact of Belgian colonialism on Congolese urban and cultural life. Katanga occupies a central position in the history of global extraction. Under Belgian colonial rule, copper, cobalt, uranium, and other minerals were mined on an enormous scale, generating wealth for colonial economies while leaving profound social and environmental consequences for local communities.[i] Baloji’s work (and particularly his Kolwezi series) repeatedly returns to these histories, demonstrating how colonial systems of extraction continue to shape contemporary realities.[ii]

Raccord #1: Cité de Kawama presents two contrasting photographic images as a diptych. It brings a Congolese mining settlement into direct tension with an image of a lush resort. On the left, rows of orange tarpaulin tents in Kawama, a temporary settlement near mineral extraction sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo, speak to the unstable conditions faced by miners whose labor fuels global industries. The shelters, assembled from industrial materials and repeatedly repaired, evoke the precarious realities of life in the community, which lacks many basic forms of infrastructure (such as potable water and electricity). [iii] Notably, Baloji does not photograph the miners themselves. Instead, he allows their presence to emerge through the spaces they inhabit, letting the built environment testify to the conditions under which extraction takes place.[iv]

On the right, Baloji presents a weathered Chinese advertisement for Ocean Park in Hong Kong, a marine and amusement park established in 1977.[v] The image offers a seductive vision of leisure, pleasure, and escape (a fantasy entirely out of reach for those whose work sustains such economies) that stands in direct contrast to the mining settlement depicted in the adjoining panel. Through this juxtaposition, Baloji examines the uneven geographies that connect extraction to consumption. While the settlement points to the labor and material conditions that underpin global industries, the Ocean Park image evokes the forms of recreation and prosperity made possible by those same economic networks. A handwritten inscription visible in the upper right, “moi et ma maison” (“me and my house”), whether added by a miner or a resident, further reinforces the complex relationship between aspiration, dwelling, and self-representation.  The image functions as a visual counterpoint to the mining settlement shown in the adjacent panel. Therefore, scholars of visual culture worldwide have observed that posters and promotional materials, such as the one in Baloji’s diptych, often become objects of aspiration and imagination.[vi] Thus, enabling viewers to engage visually with places, lifestyles, and futures beyond their immediate circumstances. By pairing these scenes, Baloji exposes the enduring legacies of colonial mining in Katanga, where wealth extracted from the land rarely benefits local communities.

The diptych reveals how images participate in this system: the resort picture invites desire, while the mining landscape reveals the realities it obscures. Neither panel focuses on people. Instead, both images direct attention to surfaces, structures, and representations, encouraging viewers to reflect on how systems of extraction shape everyday life. Together, the two panels expose the gap between the fantasy of leisure and the harsh realities of the labor that sustains global consumption. Baloji makes visible what consumer culture teaches us not to see–whose land is mined, whose bodies work, and who profits from the chains of extraction. The work is particularly resonant today because minerals from the DRC remain essential to global industries. The country supplies much of the world’s cobalt, a mineral used extensively in rechargeable batteries, smartphones, and electric vehicles. Yet rather than simply documenting the environmental and social consequences of mining, Baloji asks viewers to consider how these realities are mediated through images.  His juxtaposition of a mining settlement and resort poster highlights the distance between the conditions of extraction and the fantasies of leisure and consumption. 

Although rooted in the Congolese context, Cité de Kawama speaks to broader global systems in which the environment and social costs of extraction are often obscured from those who benefit from the commodities mining produces. Seen through this broader lens, Baloji’s diptych becomes a meditation on extraction as a global condition. Whether the mineral is cobalt in Congo, gold in Nigeria, lithium in South America, or copper elsewhere, mining often transforms landscapes while simultaneously obscuring the environmental costs of production from consumers who enjoy the final products. As demand for minerals continues to grow, particularly those used in renewable energy technologies and digital devices, concerns about water pollution, habitat destruction, toxic waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and community displacement have become increasingly urgent. The United Nations Environment Program notes that mining and metals production remain among the world’s most environmentally destructive industries, impacting air, soil, and water systems.[vii]

What makes Cité de Kawama especially powerful is Baloji’s interrogation of how images themselves participate in systems of extraction. The resort advertisement functions as a mechanism of desire, inviting viewers to imagine consumption without contemplating the material conditions that sustain it. The mining settlement, by contrast, interrupts this fantasy. In this work, Baloji challenges viewers to consider their own relationships to global commodity chains and to the images that shape their understanding of the world.[viii]

Cité de Kawama encourages viewers to recognize that oppressive colonial histories embedded within landscapes are never entirely in the past. Rather, they continue to inform contemporary economies, environmental conditions, and patterns of inequality. By making visible the connections between distant sites of production and everyday acts of consumption, Baloji invites us to look beneath and beyond the surface of images and commodities alike, asking not only where things come from, but also whose labor, land, and futures make them possible.

– Contributed by Uche Okpa-Iroha, 2025–2026 Art History Graduate Fellow

Endnotes

[i] Gabriella Nugent, “Mining Time in Sammy Baloji’s Mémoire,” African Arts 52, no. 3 (2019).

[ii] Yasmine Van Pee, “Mining Katanga: Sammy Baloji’s Mémoires,” Princeton University Department of Art & Archaeology Graduate Conference Paper, 2012.

[iii] Sammy Baloji, “Kolwezi.” Artists Statement. Axis gallery, https://axis.gallery/artists/sammybaloji/kolwezi/, Accessed August 29, 2026.

[iv] Sylvie Kande, Sammy Baloji: Constructing a Shared Off-Field.” PALM, Jeu de Paume Accessed August 29, 2026. https://jeudepaume.org/en/palm/sammy-baloji-constructing-a-shared-off-field/.

[v] Ocean Park Hong Kong. “About Ocean Park. https://www.oceanpark.com.hk,”Accessed August 30, 2026

[vi] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[vii] United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, Climate Risks in the Metals and Mining Sector (2024).

[viii] Veronique Bragard, “Reclaiming the Future: (In) Visible Dirt Borders in Sammy Baloji’s Photomontages.” Social Dynamic 44, no.2 (2018): 273 – 290.