9.1.2025

Sammy Baloji: Aequare.
The Future That Never Was

Welcome to a film screening and discussion on The Night of Science at Cinema Orion, 18:00–19:30, Thursday, 9 January 2025!

We will be showing Aequare. The Future That Never Was (2023) by Belgian-Congolese artist Sammy Baloji (b. 1978).

In it Baloji combines colonial propaganda videos with footage he has shot in the surroundings of the Belgian Congo’s colonial-era Yangambi agricultural centre. Propaganda videos produced by the former National Institute for Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, INEAC, in 1943 and 1957 alternate with Baloji’s own footage to show the environmental devastation left by colonialism in the world’s second-largest rainforest around Yangambi.

In Baloji’s film, employees of INEAC’s successor, the Institut national des études et recherches agronomiques – INERA, continue to archive the Institut’s data, surrounded by crumbling structures, and carrying on the work inherited from colonial times. The colonialists’ vision of the future is mixed with its consequences in the present, where time seems to stand still.

The film will be screened twice during the evening, with a Q&A with Sammy Baloji via Zoom between screenings. The film is in French and subtitled in English. The discussion will be in English. The film premiered in the Belgian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Schedule

18:00 Words of Welcome and introduction to the film, Paula Toppila, IHME Helsinki

18:10 Sammy Baloji: Aequare. The Future That Never Was (2023), 20 min.

18:30 Break and Q&A with Sammy Baloji

19:00 Words of Welcome to the second screening, Paula Toppila, IHME Helsinki

19:10 Sammy Baloji: Aequare. The Future That Never Was (2023), 20 min.

19:30 Event ends.