By Anna Seaman

In Katanga, the mining region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the extraction of minerals leaves its presence in the landscape. For Sorana Munsya, artistic director of the 9th Lubumbashi Biennale, the holes left in the earth also raise questions about how the territory is understood, whose knowledge is recognised and what continues to exist around the sites of extraction.

Taking place from 15 October to 15 November 2026, the biennale brings together 35 Congolese and international artists under the title Eating the Soil / Manger la terre. Organised by Picha, the independent art platform established in Lubumbashi in 2008, it unfolds across museums, schools, galleries and artist-run spaces throughout the city.

In this conversation, Munsya discusses the “epistemology of the hole”, the relationships between artworks and their surroundings, and the knowledge, labour and human infrastructure that make the event possible.

Your title, Eating the Soil, has a direct resonance in Katanga, where mining has transformed the territory. Could you talk us through its different meanings?

The title is Eating the Soil / Manger la terre (Kukuria bulongo). One of the important things for us is to emphasise that “eating” is a verb. It describes an action, and the question is: who is eating the soil, and what does it mean to do so?

The title also comes from the history of Katanga and the figure of the so-called “Copper Eaters”, people who developed a complex relationship with copper and with the material extracted from the earth. They remind us that the relationship between people and the soil cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between a territory and those who exploit it. There are histories, practices, cosmologies and forms of knowledge that have developed around the earth and its materials.

At one level, the title refers directly to the extractive logic that has transformed Katanga. The capitalist and neo-colonial forces operating through states, corporations and mining companies are literally eating into the land. They remove what they consider valuable and leave behind holes, craters and poisoned soils, while the people who live there are left with the consequences.

But the title also asks: how do we continue to live on, with and from a territory that has already been profoundly transformed by extraction? We are not entering a post-extractive era any time soon. How do we inhabit a territory that has been depleted without reducing it to depletion? How can we exist in the spaces between the holes?

In the curatorial text, you introduce the “epistemology of the hole”. What does that mean, and what might we understand about Katanga if we look beyond what has been extracted?

The “epistemology of the hole” refers to a regime of knowledge produced around extraction: a way of understanding Katanga primarily through what has been taken from it, what is missing and what can still be extracted. The hole is therefore also a way of looking, a way of producing knowledge about a territory.

The idea is in conversation with Valentin-Yves Mudimbe and his questioning of the categories through which Africa has been made knowable. Mudimbe shows how knowledge about Africa has often been produced through inherited frameworks that define the continent from the outside, determining what can be seen and what kinds of knowledge are recognised as legitimate.

If we look at Katanga primarily through extraction, we end up producing a narrative of absence. But while the soil is being extracted, what is happening with the people who live on and around it? What beliefs, practices, memories and ways of understanding the territory are being created? What grows there?

Looking beyond the hole does not mean ignoring extraction or pretending that its violence has disappeared. The hole is real. But we don’t want it to become the only image through which the territory can be understood. The question is what happens during the time of the capture?

What were the main challenges of organising this edition, and how did the context of Lubumbashi affect your approach?

Picha has been building an artistic and cultural ecosystem in Lubumbashi for almost twenty years. Sustaining that work independently, with relatively limited resources, is a remarkable strength. At the same time, those conditions inevitably affect how a biennale can be produced.

One of the major challenges this year was funding. The Ebola outbreak generated fear and uncertainty around the country. Internationally, there is often a tendency to perceive the DRC through a succession of crises, and this makes it harder to convince partners to invest in an artistic initiative.

Lubumbashi is geographically and historically very different from the areas affected by Ebola. Continuing to organise the biennale was also a way of insisting on the complexity of an enormous country and creating space for other stories to be told.

Locally, the mining industry is a major presence and influences the priorities of many economic actors. Art is not necessarily their first priority, but there is a very active community of artists and cultural practitioners. One of the challenges is to make that activity more visible and demonstrate what it contributes to the city and the wider region.

Was working with artists from the region a particular priority?

Yes. It was important to work with Congolese artists, from Katanga and elsewhere in the country, alongside artists from the African continent and internationally. But the question was also how we give each artist the same degree of attention, care and commitment.

An artist coming from elsewhere may already have an international network or institutional recognition that an artist based in Lubumbashi does not have access to. The biennale should not reproduce those hierarchies. We need to pay attention to each artist’s situation and provide the conditions they need to realise their work properly.

This also influenced the programme. We organised eleven opening days, each creating a specific moment of attention around a group of artists and projects. That was partly logistical, but it was also a curatorial decision: giving the works time and space to be encountered.

Take us through some of the works. Were there particular relationships between artists’ practices that became important as you developed the exhibitions?

At Galerie Dialogue, inside the National Museum of Lubumbashi, Sandra Mujinga, Félix Shumba and Mirhego Akitowa are presented alongside one another.

Mujinga became interested in the earthworms of Lubumbashi and their capacity to bioaccumulate metals. She imagines a speculative future in which these worms become much larger, so they can no longer be consumed by rodents, preventing accumulated toxins from moving further up the food chain. They become guardians of the territory outside the mines.

The sculptures have metal armatures and fabric bodies touched by many people along the way, suggesting networks of interdependence. The work asks what kinds of life might emerge from a toxic environment and what forms of adaptation might become possible.

Shumba’s Non-Payment for the Signing Ropes: Scene II presents a nocturnal landscape in which trees have been stripped of their bark. The bark has become ropes used to moor ships, including ships connected to the transatlantic slave trade. The trees carry traces of extraction, commerce and violence.

In the work, Shumba speculates that ants, birds, antelopes and hyenas carry mud from the rivers back to the wounded trees. They participate in repair outside human systems of ownership, compensation or accounting. The scars remain, but restoration continues. Charcoal is central too: made from wood through burning, it carries a history of organic matter, transformation and residue.

Akitowa, a sound artist living in Lubumbashi, recorded stones being broken inside the mines and transformed those recordings into Mining Music. Through sound, the stone becomes almost a character, something with a presence and a voice.

Together, these works bring forward creatures and materials usually secondary in narratives of extraction: earthworms, trees and stones. They ask what forms of life, memory and agency are still operating within the territory.

The biennale extends across Lubumbashi, beyond its established galleries. How do the venues connect with the works?

Artist-led spaces and smaller galleries generously made rooms available to us. Moving between them became part of the experience: encountering different works also means encountering different parts of Lubumbashi and the communities around each space.

At the Institut Supérieur des Arts et Métiers, a school attended predominantly by women and girls, we brought together Ruth Mpombo and Noor Abed.

Mpombo worked with the women painters of Makwacha, who paint the walls of their houses using earth pigments and other natural materials. She invited them into dialogue with her photographs of women whose hairstyles correspond to different stages of life, including pregnancy, marriage and widowhood. The work considers how knowledge, memory and identity are transmitted between women through gestures and practices.

Abed’s thirty-minute film A Night We Held Between was filmed at ancient sites in Palestine, including caves, underground passages and valleys. Women move together through these landscapes, their collective gestures becoming a form of presence and resistance.

Bringing these practices together in a school attended by young women was meaningful. Both ask how women maintain relationships with landscape and how knowledge is carried through the body.

At the Institut des Beaux-Arts, Soñ Gweha brought together soil, sand, ceramics, copper waste, sound and plant matter. A carpet of earth and sand contains fossil-like objects made from malachite, copper waste and glazed clay, evoking the Copperbelt. The work brings ancestral and scientific knowledge into conversation with local narratives and speculative futures. Soil becomes an archive and a medium through which different forms of knowledge can meet.

We wanted the artworks to enter into relationships with the places where they were shown: schools, independent spaces, artists’ communities and the city itself.

The University of Lubumbashi is also part of this edition. Could you explain the importance of Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s legacy to the biennale?

Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa has been extremely important to the way we think about the production of knowledge about Africa. He died in 2025, having donated his personal library to the University of Lubumbashi shortly before his death. His books had returned to the institution and city where he spent an important period of his intellectual life. I wanted to ask what it means to activate his thinking there today.

On 19 October, we organised a reading-performance with the university’s Mudimbe Reading Club. Students, members of the public and biennale visitors read and discussed the text together. People translated passages, questioned them, laughed and disagreed. It became a collective encounter with his work.

We continued through a collaboration with Chimurenga and the Pan African Space Station. Working from Prisme Library, they investigated Lubumbashi’s intellectual and cultural history during the period when Mudimbe taught at the university, particularly the 1970s.

The programme also made room for criticism. The writer Yam Yantumbi, part of the Prisme collective, spoke, amongst other things, about what he saw as Mudimbe’s dismissive attitude towards Cheikh Anta Diop. If we are interested in his legacy, we have to allow his work to be questioned and read from different positions.

Chimurenga also turned attention towards the environment in which Mudimbe worked. What were people reading and publishing? Who was he in conversation or disagreement with? What music circulated through the mining and railway networks connecting Lubumbashi to the Copperbelt and Southern Africa?

That period coincided with Mobutu’s policy of “authenticité”, creating tensions between official narratives and the city’s intellectual and cultural production. Exploring it through the people who lived it complicates an established biography.

For me, Mudimbe’s legacy is also a method: asking who produces knowledge, through which categories, and what those categories make visible or invisible. The biennale tried to put that method into practice.

How long did you have to organise the biennale?

Not long at all, about five months.

There had to be a collective willingness to make the biennale happen. There is a lot of knowledge here about how to organise, respond to unexpected situations and make things work when resources are limited. We often spend too much time talking about what is missing instead of looking at the knowledge and capacities that make things possible.

The ability to improvise, respond collectively, mobilise people and solve problems in real time is cultural and organisational knowledge. In many moments, that human infrastructure was as important as other types of infrastructure, and sometimes more important.

I would like to name the technicians and production team who made the biennale possible: Daddy Tshikaya, Djo Kit, Anthony Mutshipule, Ivo Da Joker, Ruth Mpombo, Semi Kansanse, Ghershom Nanukila, Emmanuelle Nsunda, Prosper Nsongwe, Annick M’Kele, Joy Mwehu, Kevin Kabambi, Nicolas Wasakwel, Joseph Kasau, Grady Bizaki and Ramcy Kabuya. Thank you to all of them.

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Sorana Munsya is an independent curator, writer and editor of Belgian-Congolese heritage, living in Brussels. Her research examines contemporary narratives from Africa and its diasporas. She founded and directs Nsomi, which supports critical thinking about art, social practices and Black life, and holds a curatorial fellowship with FNRS–FRArt. She edits for GLEAN Art Magazine and sits on the boards of ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts and The Constant Now. She is the artistic director of the ninth Lubumbashi Biennale.