Glory Nkembo Moswala

Residence period: February 2019

In his project in Blanca, Nkembo transforms by hand plastic packaging from our everyday consumption, including plastic waste from a familiar brand of laundry powder, which he brought with him to Blanca from DR Congo, into folded blooming shapes reminiscent of flowers or mushrooms. The beauty of these objects and their arrangements sit uncomfortably with the destructive, polluting and wasteful material from which they are made.

On the ground in the larger space, he has constructed a French formal garden, recreating an imposed colonial structure from the waste of globalisation.

In the second space, positioned on the bare rock which evokes the landscape of Blanca, they are transformed and arranged in organic forms, inspiring hope that life can be resurrected from the barrenness, chaos and confusion of our globalised society.

Beside this “landscape” are his Nzoloko works, with specks of light reaching through the incisions on the tarp. Light is used as a raw material to present another version of the image, and as a powerful symbol for hope. The two works creates a dialogue between them, confronting us to the relationships between the violent urban reality of Kinshasa, colonialism and globalisation in local contexts.