archiveenjoypoverty

Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008, Colour video, sound Duration: 88 minutes. English subtitles.

Images of Poverty and Emancipation Deconstructed

Wilkinson
50-58 Vyner Street
+44 20 8980 2662
London
Upper Gallery
Renzo Martens,
Episode III
15 January-
22 February, 2009

Episode III - Enjoy Poverty is the second in a series of three films by Martens in which he raises issues regarding contemporary image production. The films prompt the viewer to think about the construction of a documentary and the role of the maker in it, and the responsibility of the viewers themselves. Martens filmed the first part of the series in Chechnya, where he looks for diversion from the disappointments of romance among the ruins and victims of the war.

For Episode III Martens travelled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster. Martens shows how development aid and Western photographers delineate an image of this situation. His film confronts the public with the fact that the Africans themselves do not profit from the images that foreign photographers take of them. On the contrary: like gold and luxury foods, the images of poverty — their most lucrative export product — are also out of their reach, being exclusively exploited by the Western 'poverty industry'. As an answer to this injustice, Martens starts an emancipation project for Congolese photographers — a project that is doomed to failure.

Employing a casual film style, camera in hand, he roved through the poverty-fighting industry in the post-civil war country and regularly appears onscreen himself. He films UN peacekeepers in their SUVs supporting an international company to exploit gold; corpses of gold-digging rebels, surrounded by Western photographers, white relief workers happily photographing recipients of emergency aid, with their logo on every canvas tent they hand out; a large landowner at a photo exhibition looking at pictures of his day labourers, who don't earn enough to feed their children. It all amounts to one conclusion: poverty is there to stay, and "fighting it" is an industry of which the poor benefit very little.

Martens then launches a self-styled emancipation programme: he teaches the Congolese poor that "images of poverty" are their country's most lucrative natural resources. Under Martens' guidance, local photographers start photographing malnourished children instead of wedding parties. He mounts a neon sign in the middle of the forest that reads "Enjoy Poverty", so that the poor too can reap its financial fruits. The local populations dance frenetically, but in the end, adversities rise all over again.

Among the sources of inspiration for Martens' film is the short novel by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902), which also was the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's film epic Apocalypse Now. Conrad's book not only describes the colonial exploitation of former Belgian Congo. Above all it is a literary interpretation of the chaos and madness in a land where the natural resources are almost inexhaustible and the inhabitants almost without rights. The connecting thread in Episode III is Martens' journey through the interior of the Congo. From the central Congo, where plantation workers live in wretched conditions and child mortality is high, the artist travels together with his crew of bearers to the east of the country, where guerrillas are engaged in a war with Western corporations that are extracting the local raw materials — corporations supported by UN forces, with Doctors Without Borders in their wake.

What solutions can Martens suggest for the problems of this land? It becomes increasingly clear that the egocentric artist, who feels himself akin to romantic spirits such as Yves Klein and Neil Young, can only make a purely symbolic contribution. In doing so, he holds a mirror up to Western development aid, and thereby also the Western viewer, in which the moral dilemmas are outlined mercilessly. Before doing that, he is equally implacable in first sketching the systemic humanitarian crisis in the Congo in excruciating detail.

The hour and a half long film by Martens is a documentary in which the maker himself is constantly present as a performance artist. Martens not only conceived the idea: he is the cameraman, and a reporter and political activist at the same time. With this personal presence, Episode III provides an alternative for the ostensible objectivity in documentary work by both visual artists and filmmakers.

Renzo Martens’ practice aims to investigate and provoke the indoctrinated imagery of travesties as presented by the western media. As a troubadour of sorts, Martens’ ventures through the chaotic landscapes that we, as consumers of tragedy, appear to be familiar with. It is, in fact, this familiarity that Martens is interested in. He metaphorically identifies himself as an example of western spoiled mentality by bluntly placing himself within the direct conditions as broadcasted on television. Episode 1, his debut film, is a journey through the landscape of a demolished and oppressed Chechnya. Wandering through refugee camps, Martens reverses the role of the interviewer, one that normally documents refugees and UN employees on their current state, into a pathetic love story of a young man; heartbroken and in desperate need for attention.

This way, it is Martens himself who becomes objectified rather than the all too familiar imagery surrounding him.

These highly inappropriate interviews generate a strong feeling of discomfort and exasperation. Yet it is precisely this awkwardness that renders his egocentric and spoiled behaviour sincere. Martens symbolizes the economy of media consumption while simultaneously becoming an eclectic and therapeutical entity.

Continuing his journey of the world as a spectator’s paradise, Martens has been investigating Africa, and in particular Congo, on its potentially most lucrative export product: images of poverty. Episode 3 reveals in a direct, confrontational but at the same time naïve way Congo’s possibilities of exploiting their own poverty in addition to its usual exports such a rubber or cacao. The disturbing imagery of the local tragedy are typically utilized by the West as beneficial profits while locally nothing positively evolves.

Martens’ attempts to liberate the Congolese from this vicious circle by presenting himself as a “saviour” who educates the inhabitants to benefit from their own poverty. This utopian gesture leads to an epic expedition of true revelation in which Martens, as always, appears to be the core of its subject matter.

Renzo Martens was born in 1973, Sluiskil, The Netherlands. He lives and works in Brussels, Amsterdam and Kinshasa. Recent exhibitions include A Picture of War is not War, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2006), Soft Target, Basis Actuele Kunst, Utrecht (2005) Nothing Else Matters, De Hallen, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2007), To Burn oneself with oneself: the romantic damage show, De Appel, Amsterdam (2008).

Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008, Colour video, sound Duration: 88 minutes. English subtitles.