My name is Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe, a visual artist living and working in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. My artistic practice combines painting, drawing, sculpture and installation to explore and address notions of migration and identity, borders and space, and signs and symbols. My process uses doors and rubber as support and subject to link the themes of urban cartography and body scarification (Nzoloko) in order to explore the imaginary between urban cartography and body scarification.
Nzoloko, the Lingala word for scarification, means to scratch, etch, burn, mark or superficially engrave drawings, images or words on the skin. The incisions made during this process leave behind permanent alterations to the body that store information about a person's identity, origin and history, ultimately playing the role of an ancestral passport while negotiating pre-colonial social, cultural and political boundaries. I reappropriate the practice of scarification in my work to serve as an intermediary element linking my ancestral African identity to cartography, allowing me to confront questions of accessibility, encounter and mobility on a global scale.
In my art, I like to explore and 'use objects that communicate and have a particular meaning or history, such as the door, the stool and the rubber that I usually use in my work. For me, the door is a metaphor that symbolizes: an accessible frontier, openness, mobility, connection, travel. It's also a means of encounter and discovery in an increasingly universal society, I recover doors that have already been used, as they bear traces of the lived history of the place, the city and the people who used them. Most of my work focuses on the technique of incising the wooden or rubber support, a practice that echoes that of scarification on the skin.
In conclusion, my work functions as a "cartographic essay" in which I attempt to construct a new, global world by fusing and juxtaposing maps of different cities with scarification. It's a way for me to question and redefine cities and their cartography in order to erase the boundaries between people in their living spaces, giving birth to a unique territory in the imaginary space of my works.
