Aequare. The Future that Never Was
First exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, Sammy Baloji’s video Aequare. The Future that Never Was (2023) focuses on the rainforest around the town of Yangambi. This tropical rainforest region in the Congo is the second largest in the world and, according to many scientists, has a central role to play in the regeneration of the planet’s atmosphere. However, through the juxtaposition of different types of footage, Baloji’s video shows how this possible future is put in doubt. Indeed, by alternating between propagandist film clips of a climate study centre from the colonial period, the National Institute for the Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo (INEAC), and recent shots of its contemporary successor, the Institut National de l’Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles (INERA), Aequare raises philosophical and political questions about the pastness of the colonial past, and whether it in fact continues, albeit in different forms. Not only is the infrastructure at the INERA inherited from the colonial period and fundamentally indexed by it, but so too is the epistemological framework governing the contemporary data gathering practices that the film documents.