Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Lucie Kamuswekera's1 embroideries are not popular paintings, but they are very close to them, even if the latter are usually no longer found in Congolese homes. Born in 1944, Lucie Kamuswekera, who prefers to be known as Artiste Lucie2 (Fig. 1), belongs to the generation of Congolese for whom these paintings reflected the memories and experiences lived between the 1950s and 1990s. In her embroideries, she mostly revisits the iconotheque of popular painting by visualizing the experiences of women, but sometimes raises issues of worldwide relevance, like the COVID pandemic (Fig. 2). Explicitly, the artist's mission is to give relevance to past and present experiences, to reinscribe them in the collective life and reestablish intergen- erational links. In Congolese urban culture, the reception of the image is performative. Like a mask in a ritual, her embroideries intervene in social life and relationships. They carry a knowledge—which Lucie Kamuswekera considers currently lost—but above all they make present and therefore active the incorporated xperience whose intergenerational transmission was disrupted by three decades of armed conflict in the Kivu provinces. As a widow and grandmother, she fully assumes the role of guaranteeing generational continuity that her society grants to women. She inscribes her art in a dynamic continuity of sharing memories in images and words. She uses embroidery, a technique learned at the colonial school, to actualize male pictorial discourses on experiences lived during the second half of the twentieth century. She devotes part of the income from the sale of her embroideries to running a workshop where she shelters and trains four orphans (three girls and one boy), formerly street children, because she wants the art of embroidery to survive.For the reasons we have outlined, we need to introduce the reader to Congolese popular painting and its academic analyses. In the 1970s and 1980s, Congolese popular painting, also known as urban painting, became very popular among the city dwellers of the large- and medium-sized cities of the country then called Zaire. In a quarter of a century, a few thousand painters produced tens of thousands of paintings that were hung on the walls of hundreds of thousands of houses inhabited by families of small traders and craftsmen, workers and employees, teachers, etc. In the West, we would label them the middle class. The local popularity of these works began in the second decade after independence. Urban inhabitants found peace and modest prosperity after a decade of civil wars following independence in 1960. The authoritarian government imposed in 1968 by President Mobutu crushed the political opposition (Van Reybrouck 2015). Largely, urban populations accepted this as the price of a return to normal life. Mobutu's policies of cultural and economic nationalization were initially well received and promoted the development of a national culture in urban areas. Music played a leading role in this. The arrival of the portable 45 rpm record player democratized access to records, while the centralization of the record industry in the capital allowed songs in Lingala to spread nationwide. This language of the army became the dominant language of the capital and of public administration throughout the country. Fearing the return of regional secessionist movements, Mobutu constantly relocated civil servants and army officers, which served as another vehicle for the expansion of Lingala and cultural unification. Also, the movement of students among the three university training centers of the time—Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Lubumbashi—contributed to the language's spread.While urban painters, trained by apprenticeship with an elder, circulated only regionally, their clientele imposed on them the unification of the iconotheque. The selling price of a painting was low. Therefore, to survive, a painter had to sell many of them and constantly adapt to the evolution of taste. And as the painting itself quickly deteriorated in quality—because it was painted on recycled fabric with self-made paint—demand imposed the pictorial topics. Buyers belonged mainly to the generation that vividly remembered colonization and the civil wars that followed. The circulation of these buyers between cities promoted the national unification of pictorial representations. Since the paintings were intended for places where people met—such as the living room of a house or a bar—the image had to respond to collective expectation, rather than to the taste of an individual. The result was the emergence of a set of national icons comprising the collective imagination of the 1970s and 1980s: the Belgian colony, the mermaid/Mami Wata, scenes from Patrice Lumumbas political career. Researchers who studied this urban art referred to it as pictorial representations of collective memories. Many painters call themselves historians endowed with the mission to make visible what actually happened and to show how the events of the past affect the present. Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, best known from Johannes Fabian's book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (1996), claimed to represent the “real” past in his paintings, in opposition to the distorted past represented in official written history (Jewsiewicki 2003).From the 1990s, the West “discovered” Congolese popular painting, which became the subject of numerous scholarly publications and exhibitions. Locally, Congolese political authorities were hostile to these critical images of the relationship between the past and the present and painters’ exposure of the economic and social crises that plagued the population. Three years after the publication of Fabian's book, the exhibition A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art (1999) was held in New York City. In 2003, Bogumil Jewsiewicki's Mami Wata: La peinture urbaine au Congo was published, and in 2008, Leon Verbeek's Les arts plastiques de l'Afrique contemporaine: 60 ans d'histoire Congo that were to Congolese popular painting, or a role for throughout in and A to Art devotes a to Congolese painting (Jewsiewicki Three years the exhibition Congo Art and in in and The for where the of Congo art are was for this that popular painting is an and Congolese have popular painting in to as popular on or as an of collective and have that popular painting is of the urban as a and and in the or years not the of male painters for male who hung the paintings in places of male Popular painting male memories of the generation of the their social Since the 1990s, people have the of their generation to the country. initially to this (Jewsiewicki have also to as the of the the of memories and imagination in painting painting to and and in In the 1980s, throughout Congo to in with of Bogumil in for (Jewsiewicki the male in popular paintings, that only in paintings as a of economic or a that were not to in to society with one a a of and male with the of all the and painters had to their of Urban paintings were no longer to be found on the walls of living In than the close between this painting and the social of the who and his with income was by the sale of the paintings in the of and In the half of the 1990s, urban dwellers from the were from to their with them, they them for sale in a by it was very to a painting from its they were in to the of male on than the of the The of the in the of and As of the civil from the country to the living economic and their and imagination relevance, as their of the history of academic on Congolese popular painting the of with Lucie Kamuswekera and her the on the and reception of representations of collective and memories in male popular painters from the role of and of the past as the Congolese have she as its and them, she experiences of the 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