For two years, Dutch artist Renzo Martens travelled around Congo. Employing a casual film style, he makes his way around the poverty-fighting industry in the post-civil war country. He films UN peacekeepers in their SUV’s providing security for an international company so it can mine gold, corpses of gold-digging rebels surrounded by Western photographers, white relief workers happily taking pictures of the recipients of their emergency aid, with their logo on every canvas tent they hand out. It all amounts to one conclusion: poverty is here to stay, and ‘fighting it’ is an industry from which the poor benefit very little. Martens then launches a self-styled emancipation programme: he teaches the Congolese poor that ‘images of poverty’ are their country’s most lucrative natural resource. (source: www.idfa.nl)

tue nov 18, 16.30 hrs