A New Art Museum Stands on a Former Plantation in the Congo

Vice | DJ Pangburn:

By constructing an art center in one of the most disenfranchised parts of the world, activists want to ensure that the intellectual and financial benefits of art accumulate there, instead of places like New York and Berlin.

For years, the Unilever corporation operated a palm oil plantation in the Congolese forest in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, this former plantation is an art museum thanks to a collaboration between the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, or CATPC) and the Amsterdam-based Institute for Human Activities (IHA). The museum fittingly named the White Cube, opened April 21 in a ceremony dubbed “The Repatriation of the White Cube.” The museum lies at the heart of the Lusanga International Research Centre on Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI), an organization through which the CATPC artists are becoming both economically and artistically empowered… Read more.

Photo: Creator’s Project