White Cube (2020)

Directed by: Renzo Martens | 77 minutes | documentary

In Renzo Martens’ documentary ‘Episode III – Enjoy Poverty’ (2008), the filmmaker tried in a somewhat cynical way to help poor Congolese earn money the way Western photographers did: by photographing the suffering in their country. That failed (and resulted in the sarcastic title), but the documentary was a success. That triumph organically led to the sequel ‘White Cube’ (2020). This film is much less controversial than its predecessor, but still makes the viewer think.

A history lesson then: William Lever of the British soap manufacturer Lever Brothers started a palm oil plantation in the Belgian Congo in 1911. In addition to a job on the plantation, Congolese also got a house, so that the workers applied en masse. To this day, palm oil is extracted; for one dollar a day – which is not enough to buy food – and in poor houses the plantation workers are no better off than they were then. Martens rightly observes an enormous contradiction here: when his film ‘Enjoy Poverty’ was shown at London’s Tate Modern, and he was invited there, he saw Unilever logos all over the walls. Unilever pumps sponsorship money into Western museums, money that they can miss by underpaying the plantation workers, among other things. Why then do the Congolese see nothing of this?

Martens himself has not become any worse, he admits in ‘White Cube’. “I was able to live well on the money that ‘Enjoy Poverty’ brought in, I was even able to buy a car, I’m married in the meantime…” That honesty suits the filmmaker, but at the same time it feels a bit uncomfortable. This is taken even further when it turns out that Martens’ first attempt to bring the inhabitants into contact with art, in Botega, comes to nothing, because he is no longer welcome on the plantation due to alleged threats by ‘his’ people. Martens seeks paternal support from an older man and then bursts into tears. Why didn’t that fragment fall out of the more than 700 hours of material he collected in about eight years? Is it a role he is playing or is the emotion real? The fate of the Congolese must be close to Martens’ heart. In 2014, his project seems to be going well. In Lusanga, where the soil is completely exhausted, the plantation workers make sculptures of red river clay; images that are close to their own world (witness the image of a rape). Martens came up with the idea of ​​sending these images digitally to Western museums, where they were then counterfeited in chocolate and can be sold. To make his idea clear, he hands out Cote d’Or – it’s the first time these people have tasted chocolate. The CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) is a fact and the statues are actually on display in a museum in New York. With the proceeds and the advertising that this yields, Martens creates the opportunity to build a museum in Lusanga. It works: the inhabitants of Lusanga can now use their land for planting crops.

With ‘White Cube’ Martens does not attempt to provide a ready-made solution to the skewed relations within the art world, but the fact that he demonstrates at all that the (perhaps supposedly) involved artists actually profit just as well from the abuses in the world is already quite something. what. And the success he has achieved in Lusanga can only be inspiring.