The White Cube

What role can art play in returning resources to former colonies? Many such countries have experiences that the former colonial powers took what they could of riches and resources with them back to the West, to for example art galleries and museums, leaving its native countries robbed of not only measurable values but also important parts of their cultural identities. At the same time, international corporations have established plantations and industrial zones that lay waste to surrounding nature and people alike.

Enzo Martens from The Netherlands became a controversial figure with his 2008 film Enjoy Poverty, which explored if it was possible to working class Congolese people to market their own poverty as a natural resource. This time, Martens has collaborated with Congolese plantation workers to build an art gallery on a former palm oil plantation. They have founded the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), which produces art for their own gallery as well as being exhibited in NYC. Any funds raised from art sales are used to buy back land from multinational plantation owners. Thus, Martens and CATPC provide one possible answer to the central question raised by the film.

This is a highly engaging documentary which sheds a light on the consequences of neo-colonialism, and which will send you home with an array of interesting perspectives. The White Cube has been screened in competition at CPH:DOX and Amsterdam International Documentary Festival respectively.

Helene Aalborg

Director

Renzo Martens (b. 1973) is a controversial Dutch artist who partly lives and works in Amsterdam and Kinshasa. He created a furore with his documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), in which he argued that Congo used the country`s poverty as marketing.

This film is part of