MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

This video documents the collaboration between Renzo Martens and the art league CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise). Plantations have created great wealth for a few Western families since colonial times, including some that created or supported museums in their own names, such as Tate in England and The Ludwig in Cologne. CATPC create their works at the White Cube in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo. This arts and research centre in the middle of the Congolese plantation zones was designed by OMA, and comprises a quintessential white cube museum space. The location is symbolic. Lusanga, formerly Leverville, was established as Unilever’s first palm oil plantation. Here, Unilever has confiscated land and violently imposed monocultural agricultural practices and labour conditions. Unilever has also established itself a major art patron.

In this on-going project, CATPC’s fifteen members make self-portraits out of mud, which are 3D scanned and reproduced in chocolate in Amsterdam, the biggest cocoa port in the world. The sales of their chocolate sculptures have thus far generated profits which they have bought back 85 hectares of land around the White Cube, where they develop ecological and inclusive gardens, in opposition to monoculture. The monoculture of the homogenous, modernist white cube of art provides the capital to reclaim land, overcoming the other monoculture of corporate agriculture.

Chocolates portraits by CATPC are also available for purchase from the museum shop. All proceeds go towards helping CATPC buy further acres of land, that they will turn into ecological food gardens.