Situated on the thin line between techno-aesthetics as assemblage of supplementary elements and an original art of supplement, between functionalization, subversion, and reconfiguration of the senses, we find Danniel Toya’s artistic practice. A creative sculptor based in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the material epicenter of the financial fluxes of technological empire, where substantial elements for the production of devices (such as coltan) are extracted—Toya brings invention into real life, articulating technology as a means of mediation between experience and popular culture, nature and myths, disassembling stereotypes and human obsessions and reassembling a future logic from the discarded. The creatures Toya designs are the result of a low-tech combination of different elements and materials—wood and straw, iron and other metals, wires and batteries, electronic waste and broken dispositive pieces—through which he is able to animate robots with a technique and technology which is only apparently rudimentary. Toya’s robots are an interpellation and a provocation to urban Congolese culture—its political and social violence and its failures. Each of them is a metaphor for the recurrent short circuits in his society, like Robot professeur de défense contre la perturbation mentale, whose movements are jammed in the unconscious and comic looping of the same gesture of writing on a chalkboard, revealing that he is the one perturbed. Similarly, the Robot dactylographe informaticien continuously reproduces a supposedly important administrative task, which ends up being the production of African money to be sold to foreign powers. It embodies the bitter observation that those who are supposed to work for the community act instead often against its interests. His humorous and poetic automata re-discuss what it is to be considered normal, or human, and engage in a stark critique of the current Congolese situation. His choice in the use of the materials seems directly linked to considerations of his country being transformed into a space of digital dumping caused by the invasive presence of multinational corporations supported by corrupt political élites. However, it also reflects an intention of building a future with technology that has less to do with a practice of recycling and more with the aim of shaping a real art of the surplus, animating the psychic consequences of the techno-capitalist vortex. In the manipulation of what are considered useless, inanimate things but also lively bodies, cultures, and thoughts, Toya enacts a way of conceiving technology and techno-aesthetics as primary means of articulation of other—and counter—forms of modernity, radicated in African culture and daily life.

In the hypnotic music video for “Processhun” by the Senegalese musician, DJ, and producer Ibaaku, his creations stand in the scenario of a destruction architecture, a desert made of concrete, sort of a huge eco-monster, a context somehow frozen and uninfected by the metropolitan urban frenzy of the Congolese capital, Kinshasa. Their presence is an interruption of the linearity of the classic black and white background, evoking a possible overturn against the history of modernity. Here they are still and moving, behind and on the side of the musicians, their metallic parts move at the same rhythms of Ibaaku’s dances, dissolving and overlapping. The skeletons interact, alone and together they are brought to life. They are participants in techno-cosmic rituals and dances: alien creatures meet ancestrality, suggesting that robots can—and will—take control of a deserted city. This allusion to a futuristic scenario not unspoiled or untouched by humans, is where modernity is faced by the challenge of contamination. (Alessandra Ferlito and Olga Solombrino)