On the Urban Condition at the Edge of the Twenty-First-Century: Time, Space and Art in Question

In 2009, Mowoso, an artists' collective based in the Democratic Republic of Congo and France, initiated a project titled Ground Overground Underground (GOU). An experimental work manifesting in video, photography, prose, installation and ephemeral architecture, GOU addresses the movement of bodies and imaginaries between cities of Africa and Europe. Focusing on the travels of one man between Kinshasa and Paris, it considers the damage, political, economic and psychological, that attends such movement. Left unfinished, GOU was Mowoso's final undertaking; several unsuccessful attempts to complete it resulted in the collective's demise. Here, I ponder the reasons for this. GOU's failure to come to fruition and, eventually, the collective's disbandment, I postulate, were linked to the subject the artists sought to tackle: the twenty-first-century urban condition. The violence visited by the late capitalist present on city dwellers in the global South and, in particular, on those who would claim a right to intercontinental mobility in our increasingly globalised world, caused tensions within the collective. From these arose questions regarding the nature of time and its relation to urban space, and disagreements on the form, the meaning and, ultimately, the purpose and viability of both the work of art and art itself.