Congo (Democratic Republic of)

Fire can burn everything, destroy everything, but to harness it, as a blacksmith does, is to transform, to give shape, to create. Seize the fire! Bring forth the world.

The imperative to create – to bring into existence – unites nine artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its diaspora in the inaugural Congo pavilion for the Biennale Arte 2026. The aesthetic installation Seize the Fire! presents itself as a luminous forge where, from Kinshasa to Goma, artists abolish the power of obscurity.

“Wake up, your nest is of flames. Be worthy, and do not turn your back on it!”, writes the poet Matala Mukadi. To be in flame is to disappear. To be of flames is to carry a force that must be maintained. In the pavilion-forge, these verses become a call to kindle the collective fire of the imaginary, at the heart of a pan-African space of dreams and emotions that transcends the border of Congo-Kinshasa. Seize the Fire! is a call for new stories, stories that conjure up discourses of lack, of pain and of death. They draw their strength from ancient worldviews, radical Congolese imaginations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Black freedom libraries born in the modern era.

Not all flames destroy; many fertilise. In the forge, each individual, by taking hold of these flames, transforms the very matter of the world.