Скачать или смотреть Renzo Martens | Attempting to connect museums to the plantations that funded them. (2010-2025)

Night 3
Dutch artist Renzo Martens (b. 1973) studied political science and art. His early films Episode I (2003) and Episode III: Enjoy Poverty investigated the asymmetries of power between spectators and subjects of war and poverty in contemporary art and media. During this period, Martens observed that none of the many European art museums funded by profits extracted from plantations had ever established a program to reach out to the communities living and working on them. In 2010 he founded the Institute for Human Activities to connect museums to one of these communities and to realize a new world: not symbolically, but also in material terms. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the first plantation Unilever ever established, Martens assumed the mantle of a European museum and over time, communally, investigated what one such program could be. Since then, the Congolese plantation worker art collective Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC), has mounted the ‘best show of the year’ (New York Times, 2017) and has represented the Netherlands at the 60th Venice Biennial (2024). CATPC
uses their legitimacy and capital to purchase the land once taken by Unilever and its subsidiaries to restore their sacred forest and to create a sustainable livelihood for the communities inhabiting the lands today. On that land, a ‘white cube’ was built, a quintessential museum space, which was subsequently sentenced by an Indigenous court to return the land. To date, CATPC has reclaimed and reforested hundreds of hectares of exhausted plantation land. CATPC is the first community of
plantation workers ever to be listed in ArtReview’s Power 100. Recently, Martens and CATPC have begun to forge solidarities with plantation communities across other parts of the world, and in Martens’s native province of Zeeuws Vlaanderen, the Netherlands, they have planned to build a
new centre to connect the arts of the global working classes.
Select exhibitions (both independent and with CATPC) include Manifesta 7 (2008), the 6th and 7th Berlin Biennial (2010, 2012), Walker Art Center, (2013), Artes Mundi, (2014) SculptureCenter (2017) the 19th and 21 Sydney biennial, (2024, 2018) the 60th Venice Biennial, (2024) as well as exhibitions, presentations and screenings at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Blaxtarlines Kumasi, SCCA Tamale, National Museum Kinshasa, Museum Macan Jakarta, Picha Lubumbashi, LagosPhoto, Lagos, Sharjah Art Foundation, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, Tate Modern, London, ICA London, Wiels Brussels, Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Modern London, and KunstWerke Berlin Martens is currently completing a Ph.D. on ‘reverse gentrification’ at Ghent University and is assisting CATPC with the production a new feature documentary film, coproduced by BBC and Arte.

Summit03: «... And the Rest Were Those Nomads Who Found the Black Holes.»
Our approach to perceiving the world starts from our concept of the Earth, the geographical plateaus, and intensities that form our reality. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari expands on the meaning of territory and the forces that encode the earth into territories and decode them. The third edition of The Tehran Summit, titled «... And the Rest Were Those Nomads Who Found the Black Holes.», is dedicated to a state of in-betweenness; moving beyond set concepts of territories, disciplines, and dichotomies, and delving into the unknown.
Summit 03 will probe a geohistorical terrain where the anthropocenic concepts of history, chronology, and logical order is replaced by embracing a full spectrum of forces at play; human, non-human, organic, and inorganic all caught in the flux of creation and dissolution. In this narrative, space becomes not merely a backdrop for human production but a dynamic construction of relations where beings, materials, and non-definable forces converge, each contributing and complicit to an ever- evolving Chaosmos. In this geohistory, geological formations, climate upheavals, social turbulences, and economic shocks are all intersected, bridging deep time with human history and expanding our concepts of past events and latent futures.
The nomad here becomes an embodiment of a mindset that defies territorialized space, and static values, wielding the deleuzian war-machine against the state apparatus and its axioms. As agents of deterritorialization, the nomads embrace a rhizomatic, peripheral mode of thought/living that resists hierarchies, seeking lines of flight and new realities. Departing from this web of thoughts, Summit 03, will delve into entangled layers of geographies, histories, spaces, and time to map out new exits and potentials – those black holes where new desires and possibilities emerge.