VILLA ROMANA - HOME
VILLA ROMANA - HOME

Exhibitions

08 Jun                     29 Jun 2018

The Kongo Tribunal

Milo Rau

film and transmedia installation


You and your friends are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition on Friday,
08 June at 7.30 pm.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 2 to 6 pm and on appointment
Film screenings on Friday, 08 June at 9 p.m. and Thursday, 28 June at 9 p.m

rosa murales

exhibition view

rosa murales

exhibition view

rosa murales

exhibition view

rosa murales

exhibition view

photos: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio


For more than 20 years an inexplicable Civil War is turning a territory as big as western Europe into hell on earth. Triggered by the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Congo War, also called the Third World War, has claimed six million lives. Many observers not only see in it a fight about political predominance in Central Africa, but also one of the most decisive economic battles for the share in the era of globalization. The reasons for the continuance of this war are no longer based on ethnic differences rather than raw materials for technology, which are essential for the 21st Century. Nowhere else in the world the superposition of global interests of the great national economies, local power claims, the colonial past and the post-colonial present are more exemplary than in this crises region. Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal examines the causes and backgrounds to this, so far biggest and bloodiest economic war in human history in a unique and stunningly transmedia art project.

For the first time in national history, the Congo Tribunal brought together victims, perpetrators, witnesses and analysts of the Congo War in Bukavu /Eastern Congo and one month later in Berlin for a large, three-day civil tribunal. Presided over by a half-Congolese and half-international panel of experts, the Congo Tribunal created a humanly harrowing, profound analytic tableau. As a reaction to the passivity of the international community to the systematic attacks against the civil population, it was designed to counteract the decades of impunity in the region.
During the tribunal and in the central areas of conflict, remote villages and inaccessible mines, the documentary film The Congo Tribunal paints an unveiled portrait exposing this vast economic war. A film about conflict on a global scale, not about winning or losing rather than the value of first world wealth and the question of how long we are willing to participate in this well-intentioned genocide.

The transmedia installation involves the full-length 26h screenings of the tribunal in Bukavu and Berlin, the web game and a research space including the web archive and a variety of reading materials, and a short documentary about the impact of the documentary in Congo, hinting at the importance of the long-tail of this grand work.

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