Sammy Baloji: When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues

Sammy Baloji’s work across media focuses on the enduring impact of extractive economies—exploiting natural resources, labor, and information for profit—and their effects on land, people, and cultural forms. In When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues, he researches the physical and symbolic remnants of colonial powers and economies in architecture and the decorative arts. Baloji focuses on the complex relationships among Europe, Central Africa, and the Americas. Viewers can explore how these relationships are translated in the design of our everyday surroundings. Baloji, who is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, collapses the past and present in photographs, films, and sculpture. Key works, including Aequare: The Future That Never Was, Still Kongo, and Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues, invite visitors to look closely at Western architecture, exhibition environments, and ornamental vocabularies, revealing their connections to and dependence on land, labor, and resources from colonial territories, including the Congo. In addition to Baloji’s individual works, visitors to the exhibition will encounter two new collaborative commissions. Rethreaded Indies, created with art historian Cécil Fromont, draws from the visual language of textiles in early modern Europe and Kongo. It was produced in the Netherlands in the TextielMuseum’s TextielLab using a technologically recreated hand-woven technique. The work responds to the colonial ideologies of 17th and 18th century Old Indies French tapestries and reclaims the history that these earlier weavings misrepresented. Suspension (Debris of History, Matters of Memory), made with Fromont and architect Gloria Cabral specifically for this exhibition, transforms construction and mining waste into a large-scale suspended structure that viewers can experience from multiple vantage points. Contemporary architecture and historical Kingdom of Kongo design systems inform the work. Baloji’s, Cabral’s, and Fromont’s choice to use a zero-waste building method reflects on extraction’s material legacy. It also shows the possibility of transforming it.