Congo

Faustin Linyekula’s first performance at Onassis Stegi (in 2013), “Le Cargo”, was also his first solo. In it, he returned to the body as a tool for addressing history, violence, and displacement. For the choreographer, the body is a living archive, a canvas that illustrates nuanced shades of history often left unrepresented in official narratives.

“My only true country is my body,” Linyekula has declared in interviews, seemingly in response to the following line, “how to walk to myself, to my people, when my blood is on fire and my history in ruins?” Indeed, the choreographer’s entire oeuvre consistently poses questions of the body, both as a type of territory and as a source for a sense of belonging.

“Do we dance in order to remember?” Sometimes, the choreographer maintains, dance can become a way of asking questions to the body, a mnemonic mechanism that helps us articulate our relationship to time.

History belongs not only to historians, maintains the Goncourt prize-winning writer Eric Vuillard. In his books (“The Order of the Day”, “Congo”, “July 14”) historiography meets fiction to create a completely new genre. As he himself has said, “Both the pleasure and the challenge in writing history is how to do it from a collective point of view.”