Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction: From the Earth of Congo to the Hiroshima’s Deathscape

ARTWORK BY SAMMY BALOJI

In our 35th issue (May-June 2021), Decolonial Ecologies, we featured a long-format interview of Lubumbashi-born artist Sammy Baloji about the extractivist continuum in Katanga (south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo). His present work, Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction (in collaboration with Pedro Monaville), can be read in the continuity of this conversation, as well as in dialogue with other contributions to this issue, as it links the Belgian uranium extraction in Katanga to the 1945 US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. The following introductory text was written by Oliver Fuke for a recent exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2024), in London.

The artworks and research that was presented in Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art’s Weston Gallery relate to Sammy Baloji and historian Pedro Monaville’s ongoing dialogue about extractivism, neocolonial and Cold War interventionism in the Congo, student decolonial resistance in the 1960s, and abstraction.

In 1942, a Belgian mining company called the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga sold the United States the large quantity of uranium it required to construct the atomic bombs that it would detonate over Hiroshima three years later. Most of this radioactive material had been extracted from a mine near the village of Shinkolobwe. In the following decades, the Congo was of great interest to the major Cold War powers and remained one of the world’s largest suppliers of uranium. As Monaville has recently written, ‘Colonial extractivism in Katanga literally powered the forces of the Cold War, as the nuclear arms race aggravated and foreshadowed the growing antagonisms between the Soviet Union and the United States.’ Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction (2022) is a composition comprising fifteen screenprints in a five by three grid. This work recomposes uranium into coloured abstracted forms in yellow and red and superimposes them on top of a black and white image of an atomic bomb mushroom cloud, perhaps suggesting that the exploitation of such underground geological formations, often via coerced labour, paved the way for nuclear war.