Monologue

Monologue is a series of three drawings featuring the grandson of a former miner who worked in Shinkolobwe in the 1940s. In a monologue, this grandson, who is in Hiroshima Memorial Park, tries to understand his place in Japanese history.

This work is the starting point for a comic strip about the invisibility of the Congo in the collective memory linked to the atomic bomb. This new version of Monologue, which follows on from the 2019 version, was specially created for a group exhibition at the gallery with the aim of symbolically infiltrating visitors' libraries. This work engages with Congolese philosopher Yves Mudimbe's reflection on the library as a place for rearranging and rewriting knowledge, showing how archives can be revisited and transformed to reflect on toxicity and its legacies.