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Fransix Tenda Lomba

Fransix Tenda Lomba is a visual artist from Kinshasa, Democratic
Republic of Congo, whose practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture
and animated video. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in
Kinshasa in 2006 and is one of the principal artists of Kin Art
Studio.

As part of his residency at the Rijksakademie, Fransix worked on a new
research project that he started simultaneously in the Red Garden in
Morocco and in Switzerland entitled "Le choc est là", which is
inspired by chocolate. The double meaning of the title refers to the
cultural, economic, political, social and geopolitical shocks in the
cocoa chain, which Fransix traces from the different places of origin
of cocoa to the world of consumers. By juxtaposing elements from his
parents' personal archives depicting life in the Congo with visual
material from the archives of the world's major chocolate companies,
Fransix has created large-scale drawings that form the basis of his
video animations. These works tell divergent, yet deeply intertwined,
stories about the inter-human bond through the production and
consumption of raw materials like cocoa - personal commentaries on the
collective memories of post-colonial societies and the bittersweet
reality that the pleasure of chocolate is fraught with suffering. We
are bound by cocoa (chocolate).