Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: Towards a Reconfiguration of Identity and Geopolitics

From 2019 until 2025, Sammy Baloji worked on his artistic doctoral project at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.

His PhD, titled Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: towards a Reconfiguration of Identity and Geopolitics, is a research project in the arts on creating new memory devices based upon two existing ones used by different Luba groups living in Congo; the kasala, a ceremonial pœm and the lukasa, a memory board used in ritual performance. The two groups using these memory devises were divided during the colonial era by boundaries erected between the former provinces of Kasai and Katanga.

The research conducted and the artworks created in the context of this research project are meant to bridge these groups back together through a narrative that is part personal, part historical, part fictitious. The main questions of this research are “How can an artistic intervention help deconstruct a nationalistic notion of Congo based on colonial borders? And how, through artistic interventions, can contemporary individual identities draw inspiration from precolonial knowledges and migrations as a means for making future(s)?”

The various artistic and academic research activities carried out from 2019 until 2025 are set out in three chapters and a Handbook of images and documentation. Each chapter, in its chronology, takes up the key elements of the thesis that have motivated and activated Sammy Baloji’s research and production of new artworks.