“In February 2025, as Eastern Congo plunged into renewed conflict and Kinshasa braced for political and psychological collapse, David Shongo’s Café Kuba emerged as an urgent and poetic act of resistance. Against the backdrop of war, colonial aftershocks, and economic exploitation, Shongo invents a “fugitive cinema” — a practice of radical listening forged in movement, concealment, and survival. At its center is the Café Kuba, a repurposed street vendor cart turned mobile recording device, which traverses the fractured streets of Kinshasa to collect voices, silences, and ambient memory. Through haunting sound design, poetic imagery, and masked figures draped in electronic debris — remnants of the global race for Congo’s strategic minerals — the work transforms an everyday object into a cinematic instrument of historical reckoning. Café Kuba maps the city not only as geography, but as a body marked by trauma, resistance, and unfinished struggle. The jury awards Café Kuba the 2025 State of the ART(ist) main prize for its aesthetic precision, conceptual clarity, and unflinching engagement with one of the world’s most enduring and underacknowledged conflicts. In a moment when visibility is dangerous and silence is imposed, this work dares to listen. It is a deeply moving political-poetic response to survival in times of collapse—and a powerful example of what art can offer when the world turns away.“
Jury Statement
Café Kuba by David Shongo explores the act of creation in a context of war, collective trauma, and political instability. Filmed in Kinshasa after the fall of Goma and Bukavu to rebel forces, Shongo invents a new creative approach: a form of “fugitive art”—an aesthetic gesture born out of urgency, rooted in the vital need to create while evading authoritarian repression. He repurposes a street coffee cart into a mobile, poetic, and political recording device.
This cart becomes the central protagonist, capturing the city’s pulses, bodies, and invisible tensions. Through a poetic visual language and immersive 3D sound design, the installation immerses the viewer in an intimate, fragile, and politically charged urban choreography of Kinshasa.
Café Kuba, David Shongo (CD), Photo: David Shongo
Credits
Written & Directed by David Shongo I Produced by Tommy Simoens Gallery & Studio 1960 I Executive Producers: Tommy Simoens & David Shongo I Production Management: Olga Sherazade Pitton I Assistant Directors: Kevine Booto & Divin Kayanga I Cinematography: David Shongo I DoP: Kevin Booto I Costume Design: Divin Kayanga I Sound Recording: Djoe Wamba I Sound Engineering: David Shongo I With: Christian Tamba, Celeo, a.o.
The presentation of the work is funded by State of the ART(ist), a collaboration between the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ars Electronica.
David Shongo
David Shongo, composer and contemporary artist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, explores the interaction between sound and image, highlighting their poetic impact. He examines the influence of colonial fiction on memory, revealing historical, political, and economic dynamics, as well as traumas and cultural dissonances. His work combines sound, cinema, digital art, and visual art. He founded the Pianos de Kinshasa Festival and co-founded Studio 1960.
