Performa Biennial ’19: Sènsa by Paul Maheke and Nkisi

About

Through a varied and often collaborative body of work encompassing installation, video, and performance, London-based French artist of Congolese descent Paul Maheke considers the body as an archive and examines how memory and identity are formed. Congo-born, Belgium-raised Nkisi is a founding member of NON Worldwide, a combination of experimental record label, radical art project and cross-continental network focusing on the African diaspora. Melding 1990s hardcore techno with syncopated Congolese drum compositions, Nkisi’s unique, and particularly fierce style of music, draws on her personal trajectory and explores questions of identity and migration through sound.

Maheke and Nkisi’s new live performance, Sènsa, is informed by Dr. Kimbwandènde Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau’s 1991 seminal book African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: Principles of Life and Living​. Here, the cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo serves as a point of entry for the work and grounds the performance in a diasporic imaginary; one that is “in-between.” A blurring of the field of vision is at the heart of Sènsa, a Bantu word that translates as “coming to visibility,” “to appear from far away,” “to reveal itself.”

Through sound, light, and movement, Sènsa brings to the fore diasporic geographies, displacement of knowledge, and questions of visibility and invisibility of the black body in public space. The performance plays with motifs of presence and withdrawal, oscillating between visibility and erasure thanks to a lighting system conceived by Berlin-based artist Ariel Efraim Ashbel. To confuse the senses further, Nkisi’s music alternates between atmospheric waves and forceful musical spasms to create a disorienting sonic environment generated and treated live by sound captors installed on the theater’s walls and floor. Ghostly shadows appearing and disappearing, concise repetitive gestures, mumbled words akin to spells being cast, and echoes of the building’s vibrations serve as strategies to build an intoxicating performance.