EXTRACTION
The second session on Wednesday 19 November 2025, 5-6pm, FAB4.79 will focus on EXTRACTION through Sammy Baloji’s documentary L’Arbre de l’authenticité [The Tree of Authenticity] (2025).
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, SMLC Professor of French Studies, who is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded project entitled ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Culture and Resource Extraction’, will lead this session. Here's a brief description of the documentary:
In this essay film, which was bestowed the prestigious Tiger Award at the 2025 Rotterdam International Film Festival, Sammy Baloji provides an overview of his native country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), through the prism of the environment and its devastation. Since colonial times, the DRC, formally known as the Congo Free State and then the Belgian Congo, has been regarded as one of the world’s major purveyors of raw materials including rubber, palm oil, diamonds, copper, uranium, cobalt and coltan. By focusing on two agronomists employed by the colonial state, this film explores the links between science, race and extractivism. We will reflect on Baloji’s archival work over the past twenty years and explore the narrative devices employed in this documentary to bring the past and present into dialogue.
The documentary can be watched with English subtitles here.