Sandrine Colard

Just as the sun sets and rises either side of the equator, Sandrine Colard follows an overlapping rather than binary logic in the pursuit of knowledge-making — one of ‘decompartmentalisation’. She weaves her practice between teaching, curating and research, between the US, Europe and Africa, inspired by her Belgian-Congolese heritage and beyond. As the appointed curator-at-large, Colard is fittingly situated to contribute to KANAL-Centre Pompidou’s emergence as a twenty-first century museum in Brussels; she also works as a historian of Modern and Contemporary African Arts and Photography at the Department of Art History in Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey. Following a series of failed attempts to meet in the same country, we finally sit down at a table in a coworking space on the edge of the Sonian Forest.

MM: (Michelle Mlati) I’ve been interested in getting to know your practice as a curator, especially since you are based between Brussels and New York. How did you start your career as a curator?

SC: (Sandrine Colard) I stumbled upon it … You know, I was actually asked to curate shows. The first show I curated was when I was finishing my PhD, together with Giulia Paoletti and Joshua Cohen. It was called The Expanded Subject: New Perspectives in Photographic Portraiture from Africa. So I learned by doing. It’s interesting, because I teach a class this semester about curating in the twenty-first century, and I get to put in relation the literature about curation and what I really learnt by doing. What I realised is that there is no guidebook that really explains what it is to curate. I think that there are as many curatorial practices as there are curators. I guess that’s the beauty of it, that it’s all different. So, it’s because people asked me to do it and institutions approached me. That’s how I started.

MM: It didn’t come from a disciplinary perspective, from being trained in curatorial studies?

SC: No, I was doing my PhD in art history and I always thought about academia, but I have to say that I don’t compartmentalise. For me, the research, the teaching, the curating — it all goes hand in hand. These are just different declinations of my thinking, but I never saw these as different rooms in my head … And it’s incredible how separated it is. I remember when doing my graduate studies in art history at Columbia, we barely interacted with the MA students in Curatorial Studies. I’m sure it has changed now. There are so many curators and so many great thinkers that this parochialism is fading, but there was this culture that doing research and being an academic was pure art history, and that as soon as you went into the museum world or even worse, the art market, it was definitely something else.

MM: And what inspired your move to New York from Brussels — or was it from elsewhere?

SC: Back then what I wanted to study wasn’t available in Belgium. I first left to do an MA in African art studies at NYU and there was no such programme here. I wanted to go to an English-speaking country, so it was either to the UK or to the USA, and I’ve always had a strong attraction to New York. I didn’t have plans to continue with a PhD after doing the MA, but I was lucky enough to study with great people like Manthia Diawara. I loved the style of education so much, the seminars and their small group discussions, that I decided to apply for a PhD, which is what made me stay longer than the initial plan.

MM: Is it a sort of home now? How do you see home between Brussels and New York?

SC: I’ve always found that the place of in-betweenness — and maybe it’s due to my own history — is the most productive one. I love having a foot or a home in different places because it prevents you from becoming too comfortable in one place, it forces you to always look at things from other angles … Especially for what we do, related to art, to postcolonial histories et cetera, I often think that there could be a much more productive dialogue between the US, Europe and Africa. Often there is a hegemony of the American discourse upon the rest of the world. So, I am always going back and forth between Africa and the Congo, Europe and the US. And, for me, this circulation is really where I found it the most productive space to think about what I am interested in. So, either no home or multiple homes … !

MM: The way that you are moving seems to follow how a lot of your work addresses practices extractive of natural resources. It’s quite interesting to think about your physical movement along the themes that you explore.

SC: Yes, for sure. I was born here in Brussels, my father was Belgian and my mum is Congolese. I was raised by my mother and growing up we’ve spent summers over there, so we’ve always gone back and forth between the two countries. Then when I studied and started to do research about the Congo, I was struck by how — and it’s true for most of the African continent — researchers came from abroad, doing their ‘fieldwork’, and then never shared the outcome of their research with the local people … I remember very vividly that when Sammy Baloji invited me to curate the 2019 Biennale, I was like yes, yes! That was such a rewarding moment when I was able to be with the local community and with my family, and make them the first audience of what I am doing. It was an opportunity that I was so happy to seize and I am working on partnering with more African institutions. As the whole field of exhibiting African art becomes more ethically accountable, the issue of knowledge extraction is much more present.

MM: I’d like to talk about the 6th edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale, which is called ‘Future Genealogies Tales from the Equatorial Line’. As a curator, how were you relating to artists both within the Congo and within the Central African region?

SC: Because I have been there and have researched the Congo a lot, I knew many artists on the local scene already. I was lucky enough to know Sammy Baloji, because he had asked me to be part of workshops for young local artists before. And it’s so nice to see many of them today becoming big artists. Like Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Hadassa Ngamba, Nelson Makengo, … I remember Nelson being so young then and now he has his film Rising Up At Night at the Berlinale and in festivals throughout the world. Many of them I knew because we had organised workshops, so it was very organic. For me, it was to put these scenes in the Congo in relation to other African and Western countries, and it’s something that I wanted to develop much more, but because of practicalities, it wasn’t possible. Because of this idea of the equatorial line, I wanted to put in touch more with the Indonesian scene, and the Asian scene. Of course, there are always contingencies on the practicalities of things, but back then we had a collaboration with the ruangrupa collective. It was a simultaneous projection of films in Indonesia and in Lumbubashi. I guess what I want to say is that I like to decompartmentalise scenes. (And especially when I can pronounce it right … !)

MM: That’s quite interesting thinking around the equatorial line, thinking about the Earth in a way that’s far beyond geopolitical constructs …

SC: The Congo is a place that has been so overdetermined by external visions, by images … I remember when I was trying to come up with an idea for the Biennale, I wanted to find something that could repurpose the way we think about the place. And that’s why I liked this idea of the equator, linking places differently than this separation between hemispheres … I loved how it reintroduced some poetry, different ways to look at the Congo.

MM: Reading some of the reviews on the Biennale, it seems that raw materials were a potent element in your approach and in the selected artworks.

SC: It’s certainly not possible to be in the province of Katanga and not think about the soil and what’s underneath it, because it has basically determined the history of this place for the last 200 years. Katanga is a rich mining region, supplying minerals such as cobalt, copper and diamonds. Many of the artists, especially local artists, have taken that question of extraction and how their fate has not been in their hands because of what’s in the soil. Thinking about minerals is something which anchors you and, in a way, doesn’t give you the freedom to move or think differently. So, there was this balance between freedom of imagination, and acknowledging that when you are in Lubumbashi, the regional capital, the industry around the mines is so present that it is something that you cannot escape. There was this beautiful work by Dorine Mokha. Dorine tragically passed away a few months after the Biennale. He was a beautiful artist and performer, and he came up with this story. It was Lubumbashi in 2030. He imagined — as the son of someone who has worked in the mine — how to envision the future for the city that would have nothing to do with mineral determinism. It was a perfect moment to open the Biennale, because it was exactly the thing I wanted to infuse into the space. This constant balance between mineral extraction and the question of how we twist that reality. Why is it the thing that defines the place locally?

MM: I think it also links to how you refer to genealogies rather than to histories, talking about this ‘intertwinedness’ of the Congo and the rest of the world in global extractive practices that were occurring locally. And, again, going back to this equatorial line as a way to imagine earthly positioning. I also get the sense that soil is an important element in your practice as well?

SC: Soil is interesting, of course, as the ancestor’s land. And, at the same time, you are being deprived of any sort of ownership of home. It’s a constant back and forth between the two that is very particular to the Congo.

MM: And could you say more about the poetics of soil in relation to the equatorial line? How were you thinking about it beyond colonial tropes?

SC: To me it goes back again to this idea of connectedness. I feel that we are at a stage where nothing can take a back seat. These are decolonial questions, postcolonial questions, feminist questions, ecological questions … I feel like people don’t want their own issues to be deprioritised because there is something more important … Sometimes the ecological question is so primordial that it could become yet again another way to say, ‘you take the back seat and we’ll deal with that.’ And for me, to speak about genealogies rather than histories was really a way to say that all these stories are connected. We won’t fix one unless we address the rest.

MM: I see.

SC: The idea of genealogies, for me, was interesting because — God knows, this isn’t always an easy discourse to carry — but we won’t survive unless we face these issues all together. There’s an urgency to recognise how everything is connected. Also, it’s important to look at the way we look at stories that have been erased and that aren’t valued or recognised. Black artists have had to say this in several artistic movements, because history (and maybe genealogies too) is such a heavy word, with a big ‘H’. I thought, maybe let’s do away with this word a little bit and let’s try to find a way to weave stories together … and, for me, ‘genealogies’ did that better than ‘history’ back then.

MM: There is also something about genealogies that goes back to thinking about networks of kinship, which is a different way of thinking about time and continuity. This makes me think of the Karrabing Film Collective: the grassroots Indigenous-based media group that often works on intervening in global images of Indigeneity. Is that a group you still work with today?

SC: Elizabeth Povinelli — a professor, writer and artist representing the group — participated in the Biennale because we couldn’t have the whole collective. We had what we called the Forum Days. We collaborated for the Biennale with the local universities and we had these two to three days of conferences; she was part of a panel. It was a wonderful mix of local artists and international people. I was in Rome two weeks ago and I saw a new film with her and the Karrabing Film Collective. It was really good so I would like to work more with them in the future.

MM: Sammy Baloji seems to be someone you have worked with over time — I’m referring to the essay that you wrote, ‘Hunting and Collecting: A Contemporary Journey Into the Colonial Album’ (2016). And I am also curious about your experience with Léonard Pongo’s Primordial Earth series that you worked with for the Biennale. Both artists seem to be very important in your practice.

SC: Sammy was the very first artist that I interviewed as a student, we are roughly the same age. I remember that he was in a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. I travelled, we met: I feel a little bit like we grew up in parallel. He is from Lubumbashi, my family is from Lubumbashi — so it has been really interesting to look at his work. We have had an interesting dialogue over the years. We have worked together, me as an art writer and him as an artist. We collaborated on the Biennale because he is one of its founders: all these different roles feed into one another. And it is also important to give credit to the people who came before us: there’s Toma Muteba Luntumbue, who has been doing great work, or Aimé Mpane, who has been in Belgium for a long time.

Léonard Pongo’s Primordial Earth was another great work in the Biennale. It was a beautiful way of infusing poetry back into the Congolese landscape, he does that well. It’s such a successful series and you can see that people really respond to that. His work was definitely one of the ones that I had in mind early in the process; it really inspired the concept of looking at the landscape differently in Africa. In South Africa, in the Congo, the landscape is so charged with so many projections and with so many histories … I think that the landscape is something extremely difficult to treat with intelligence when it comes to Africa, because it very quickly falls into exoticism, or you fall into the purely documentary … To be able to approach it in a different way, I think it’s difficult to do it right, and I really thought Léonard did it beautifully with this series. It was a work I was very happy to have in the Biennale.

MM: And recently you also had a public talk at MoMu — Fashion Museum Antwerp, together with Baloji, the Belgian musician, who was the 2024 Oscars entry for Belgium this year, and artist and designer Brandon Wen, who is the creative director of the Fashion Department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. How do you relate your practice to this constellation of practitioners? And how do you approach the form of a talk or artist talk in your practice?

SC: I deep-dive into an artist’s work. It was Baloji’s first feature film, and it was very impressive. I guess everyone in Belgium knew him as a musician. I knew the videos; they were very promising, and you could see there was a filmmaker’s eye in there. I love to dig deep into artists’ practices, so I really need to take time to read.

MM: When you are not curating exhibitions physically, I think your practice relates to writing as a sort of para-curatorial practice.

SC: Yeah, I look at art, writers and ideas as much as I look for ideas. To me it’s really a question of dialogue and seeing what is the artist’s discourse, how does it relate to other things, to music — I have a music background.

MM: Oh, really? I really didn’t know that.

SC: Yes, I’m trying to find a way to bring in music together with the visual arts, because it’s something that speaks to me a lot. And I think, especially as an African arts specialist, this is such a Western-centric way of looking at the arts that you have this discipline, this discipline, this discipline … When you are training in a PhD programme, you spend so much time reading about your niche and about what’s going to get you your diploma. And the next step is to look at different things, to look at things that are not considered special. After finishing my PhD, it was really important for me to reopen everything and to see how music fits.

MM: And what kind of music were you taught about?

SC: I have a classical music background and this is something I did when I was very young.

MM: I think I can relate to this idea of the PhD putting you in a sort of focus in a particular discipline — how do you break out of that? As I find myself leaving the academic space, I realise I just can’t focus on one or two people for four years when there are so many practices that exist that remain hidden, or those that do not need to be codified by academic language. Coming back to the perspective of gender in your work, which artists do you think are not being discussed enough or given enough space? Also, given KANAL’s collection, how do you foresee your contribution in this regard and also how might this be related to the show you will be curating for the opening of KANAL? Is that something you see shaping its collection’s strategies and policies?

SC: I do. Contemporary artists will be showing a lot but I always try to give due attention to the generations that came before us and who were not necessarily given space. I remember when I did this show at WIELS a few years ago, I was always amazed at how Pélagie Gbaguidi, who has been in Belgium for a long time, was not being shown enough in Belgium. I remember seeing her work at documenta 14, and I remember thinking she has lived here forever, how come her work is not being shown more? In the WIELS exhibition, I wanted to give her space, because there are people who think the younger generation of African artists just showed up spontaneously not that long ago. But there is a longer lineage of artists that have not been given their due …

MM: That happens very often with African artists, especially women artists.

SC: Exactly, especially women. Pélagie has always been a very well-recognised artist, but I was really happy to have this small contribution in making her work more visible in Belgium and to establish the ‘genealogy’ of her work (to avoid the word history). There is always the danger of younger artists, contemporary African artists, to become commodified so quickly that people don’t have the historical or critical discourse that should come with it. To me, it was always important to present African artists, but I wanted to make sure their work was given the critical support it needed. Instead of becoming the toy of the art market, to provide for artists that foundation and make sure it lasts.

MM: You work intergenerationally with artists.

SC: Yes, I like to do that.

MM: Which curators have been your most memorable collaborators?

SC: I have always been an independent curator. So, every time I’ve been invited, it’s been a really interesting school, because it gives you an insight into how institutions work. So, I don’t know if I can pick one person, but a name that comes to mind is Deborah Willis, because she’s a curator, a thinker and a pioneer of so many different things. She is a historian of photography and a photographer. I have never met anyone who has used her power as well as her. She constantly opens the door for others. She receives probably 150 emails a day, and she will answer every one. I have to say that it has always been a lesson to see how power can actually be benevolent in the art world and make things evolve. It’s not a curatorial collaboration, but she has really been important in how I look at how things can be, or can be done.

MM: Do you have any unrealised projects and what will you be working on in the future that you are able to share?

SC: It’s not a curatorial project, but I would like to do a film. A film that’s in relation to curation but sort of hybrid … But I’m working on another project with a colleague, which is an exhibition on the relationship of photography to textile, especially from the African point of view. I think I will try to produce a small film based on this. I would love to do that!