Hunting & Collecting

Sammy Baloji’s works have their roots deep in the ongoing upheavals in Democratic Republic of Congo. At the macLYON, Sammy Baloji has erected a monumental structure that recalls the old dioramas in museums of natural history. The artist recently collaborated with Chrispin Mvano, a journalist from North Kivu (a war-ravaged province) on a photo album project. The album in question contains old colonial photos taken by Belgian Commander Henri Pauwels during his expedition to the then Belgian Congo, between 1911 and 1913. Baloji took inspiration from these to collect together new montages of photos taken by Mvano and photographs of his own taken against the backdrop of the town of Goma. There are, furthermore, fifteen images and watercolours, reproductions from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, that retrace the steps of an expedition to the then Belgian Congo by the famous taxidermist Carl Akeley, along with pictures showing the construction of the diorama that housed“The Old Man of Mikeno”, one of the first stuffed gorillas in the world. There is also a thirty-two page book, a plan of Commander Henri Pauwels’s expedition to Africa, drawn by Chrispin Mvano, the map used by Carl Akeley on one of his African expeditions, as well as drawings of mineralogical studies by the Congolese metals and mineral trading company, Gécamines.