“If you ask them why they dress like that, they will tell you: ‘To be clean,’” says French artist Jean Christophe Lanquetin, as we study environmental portraits of Congolese sapeurs taken in Kinshasa’s ghettos. The photos are sprawled out on the floor at one of the August House artist studios in downtown Johannesburg, where Lanquetin is co-curating — with Athi-Patra Ruga and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt — a show called The 100 Year W[e]ar / Ju Wish / Bi Lamba Ma Be.
The digital prints, which for now appear on A4 paper and have been laid out in three horizontal rows of about 10 on the studio’s cement floors, form a central part of the project. They are destined for the walls of Yeoville, Rosebank or the Drill Hall, where a ‘fash off” competition, featuring various teams of fashionistas, will take place.
The roll-out on April 30 will be amid inner-city commuter mayhem — in a nod to the clash of sub-cultures in that milieu.
A few, nearly lifesize, reproductions have been erected already on walls around the fashion district in a recent event hyping the impending completion of a complex, for now called Fashion Kapitol, hailed as the future ‘mecca of pan-African fashion”.
The pictures, which were shot by Lanquetin between 2006 and this year, feature sapeurs in various ‘codes”, which are either used for competitive purposes or to better show off the labels or trimmings of their garments. ‘This is an extra simple concept,” says Lanquetin of the photographs. ‘It’s the same quality of work that would be produced for a gallery, but we are trying … not to have the public go to a gallery, but the work to go to the public.”
While the photographs are simple and repetitive, it is in understanding the history of sapeurs and by setting them within the show’s conceptual framework that they develop gravitas. ‘The show looks at how people express themselves after whatever happens,” says Ruga, in his trademark flustered manner.
Lanquetin draws my attention to one photograph of a woman dressed in black, carrying a wheeled suitcase in the middle of a Kinshasa ghetto. Another one features a youth, probably in his early twenties, straightening his suit jacket, cheeks slightly puffed in a gesture that is all self-importance. In many of the photographs an audience, dressed in the haphazard manner that poverty dictates, is present in the background. But consistently, the shots are framed by the decaying urban landscape one immediately associates with many post-colonial African countries — and the perpetually war-torn Congo in particular.
In a way The 100 Year W[e]ar is a logical progression for Ruga, who constructed his video project Miss Congo in Kinshasa as part of Urban Scenographies, where Lanquetin also exhibited his photos.
The work, which was also about dress codes, featured Ruga in androgynous clothing or in drag, interacting with dilapidated Congolese architecture.
While The 100 Year W[e]ar might actually highlight similarities and differences between swenkas, pantsulas and sapeurs, ultimately, it is about clothing as a unifier. The Melville-based fashion designers, the Nu Kids, also taking part in the fash off, don’t necessarily see fashion as avant-garde. ‘They are just existing. They just are.”
Ruga says the show is also about Johannesburg, ‘a city where people are moving to, from the Congo. There might be a lot of xenophobia here, but fashion is a progressive thing that binds us.”
The fash off will take place at The Drill Hall on April 30 and will feature teams such as the Nu Kool, the Emo Fringes, the Pantsulas and others