ABSTRACT
Gazing, visuality and colonialism have a long and tragic history. This chapter aims to trace elements of a decolonial countervisibility that work with multiple diversified gazes and their right to look and a street-level, bodily-affective engagement as remedies of hope against colonial violence. The intention of diversifying gazes is revealed at two levels. Firstly, it happens by following in the footsteps of the artistic and political activist film collective Faire-part, ‘an ensemble of Belgian & Congolese filmmakers that want to tell new stories about Kinshasa, about Brussels, and relations between the two’. Included here is an analysis of the prize-winning performative documentary Faire-part from 2019. Secondly, the same film is evaluated within a focus group of four women having different affiliations to Kinshasa. From the reception side, these diverse responses mirror those of the four filmmakers whose life experiences and viewing positions prove strikingly different. The chapter examines both the different aesthetic tactics in the performance art works in Kinshasa and the filming process that deals with how an ethics of incommensurability becomes a strength in terms of visual expression.
