On 14th May, 2021 blaxTARLINES KUMASI and the Opoku Ware II Museum hosted world-renowned Dutch artist and filmmaker Renzo Martens on his global launch of the feature-length documentary film White Cube (2020) which toured more than 14 institutions in four continents around the world. The previous day saw the back-to-back screening of Martens’s 2008 documentary film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty and White Cube at the blaxTARLINES space nested in the Department of Painting and Sculpture on KNUST campus.

Altogether, the films explore the tension between labour and capital, as well as the emancipatory potential of art, in the particular instance of Congolese workers on former Unilever plantations, through community-based and collectivist strategies, social engineering models, relational methods, alternative pedagogy, et al. More specifically, White Cube— as an artistic project that led to the construction of a museum in Lusanga, DR Congo— aims to reverse the age-old inegalitarian operation in the historical relationship between plantations and top tier museums around the world.

Martens also discussed how the collective of plantation workers named Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) were able to buy back land from multinational plantation companies and institute a “post-plantation” museum on it. For Martens, “the repatriation of the white cube to a plantation owned by its workers” is one way of redirecting capital from its alienatory tendencies and situating it where labour is active and where production is crucial. In order to achieve this Martens and his collaborators at one and the same time distinguished between the ideological notion of the white cube and conflated it with its literal or physical embodiment to be able to think of a way through, rather than outside of, what they perceived to be the crux of the politics of inequality in the art system. Renzo Martens also reflected on his position as a white male in this complex dynamic of race, class, and equality.