Lumumba’s Ghosts: Immaterial Matters and Matters Immaterial in Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres

Abstract

Through a detailed analysis of Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen’s 2011 multi-media exhibition Spectres, which focuses on the mystery of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the independent Republic of the Congo, this article argues that a focus on immaterialities prompts us to take seriously that which is not immediately apprehensible or deemed inconsequential. At the same time, it transforms our understanding of matter itself, since immateriality is inevitably implied in materiality, both metaphorically (materialities may be considered immaterial, insignificant) and literally (over time, materialities may transform, decay or even disappear). The analysis shows how Augustijnen’s work, by appealing to Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality, moves the materiality of the immaterial and the immateriality of the material centre stage and lays out the consequences of this double imbrication for individual and collective understandings of history, memory and the archive.