Becoming Through an Encounter With an Artistic Congo Village Event in Norway

Abstract

Through Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner’s processual art project European Attraction Limited, I learned that there was a human zoo at a jubilee exhibition in the capital city of Norway around 100 years ago. This human zoo was set up as a “Congolese village” including 20 “primitive” huts built of reeds covered with palm leaves. Within the “village”, 80 presumably Congolese children, women, and men were performing “authentic African life” as a partly entertaining display to spectators. In the article, I explore what emerges when encountering this project, not as an art critique but as an educational researcher in Norway interested in race and racialization and how to invent different ways of creating more livable worlds.

African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography

“…In fact, one reason autoethnography may be useful to Africanists is that it is agnostic with regard to discipline, theory, and method. In our review of Africa-related autoethnographic work we found examples in disciplines as diverse as accounting (Retief Venter & de Villiers 2013), anthropology (Schmidt 2010;Begley 2013;Berckmoes 2013;Jourdan 2013;Tomaselli 2013;Koot 2016;Thompson 2017a;2017b;2020;Williams 2021;Kefen Budji 2022), business (DeBerry-Spence 2010), communications (Ferdinand 2015), cultural studies (Tomaselli 2003;Tomaselli & Shepperson 2003), economics (Ansoms 2013), education (Ramrathan 2010;Hernandez, Ngunjiri, & Chang 2015;Tomaselli 2015;Balfour 2016;Timm 2016;Andersen 2018;Mitchell 2016;Brock-Utne 2018), feminism (Dillard & Bell 2011;Mitchell & Pithouse-Morgan 2014), history (Sheldon 2019), international relations and development (Bouka 2013;Clark-Kazak 2013), linguistics (Mwaniki 2016), political science (Vorrath 2013), psychology (Naidu 2014), social work (Schmid 2010), theater (Ajwang' & Edmondson 2003), as well as in studies of development (Tomaselli 2007;Johnson 2011;Ogora 2013;Koot 2016), diaspora (Williams 2010;…”