Past, Present, Future is an immersive and interactive art installation that seeks to put displaced Congolese and African artwork - commonly displayed in world museums - into their original cultural context. The exhibit's immersive experience sheds light on the colonial exploitation of African peoples and their lifestyles: specifically the expropriation of lived African spiritual and artistic expressions. These artifacts - sometimes stolen outright, sometimes obtained through imbalanced terms of trade, and sometimes obtained by fair bargain - often appear in exhibits as disembodied objects devoid of explanation or reinterpreted through the conceptions of the exploiters. This phenomenon has historically supported the consciousness of colonialism and now of post- and neo-colonialism, maintaining its propagation through museums, schools, and other institutions worldwide.
The exhibition is composed of a virtual environment in addition to projection mapping. The visual, aural, and interactive elements engage with and challenge the viewer's culturally conditioned ways of thought regarding artwork "consumption." This thesis, building on the exhibition, examines the possibilities of employing evolving technology and coding toward the long-term task of "softly" repatriating displaced artifacts while starting a conversation about physical repatriation and providing a model that Congolese scholars and artists can use to preserve and reclaim their cultural heritage. / Master of Fine Arts / Pieces of art from Congo and much of Africa are often perceived in the Western world as exotic objects to be looked at and photographed. To the Congolese people, those objects are an essential part of their ongoing life. It goes without saying that they are central to the collective spirit, sense of the world, cultural identity, and ancestral history. Past, Present, Future is an immersive art installation that takes displaced works from Congo and other settings in Africa and restores their living context through a Congolese artist's lens. This paper examines the process by which they were extracted from their home and found their way onto Western institutions, what they were and what was lost, and how through contemporary technology-integrated creative expression, they may be made whole for the enrichment of those from whom they came, their current hosts, and people everywhere.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/115890 |
| Date | 27 July 2023 |
| Creators | Kimbangu, Rodney Bidi |
| Contributors | Art and Art History, Tucker, Thomas James, Franusich, David John, Weaver, Rachel L. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
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