[Blake_Stimson,_Gregory_Sholette]_Collectivism_aft(z-lib

236 Okwui Enwezor
and economic crisis of the last decade of Mobutu’s corrupt, dictatorial misrule
as Congolese civil society began a process of realignment. Taking its
name from the biblical prophet Amos who in the Old Testament is identiWed
with the struggle for social justice, the grassroots activist movement
initiated by members of Le Groupe Amos evolved, in the context of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, an extension of the tactics found in Latin
American liberation theology, infusing their activism with the ethics of civil
disobedience and “creative non-violent action” 30 inspired by Ghandi’s philosophy
and Martin Luther King Jr.’s work. As a collective, one of their
principal quests was how to deal with the crisis of legitimation facing millions
of disempowered Congolese silenced by the venality of a brutal regime.
In a way there was an idealism surrounding this quest, especially when it
concerns the choice to offer a different critical option to the Congolese
public beyond the armed rebellion being waged against Mobutu in order to
free the subjective force of their repressed society by means of direct action.
Four points are important in the work and conception of Le Groupe Amos.
The Wrst is its identiWcation with the political, social, and cultural aspirations
of the ordinary Congolese. This means that all its works, which often
take a didactic format, are produced both in French—the ofWcial lingua
franca of the state—and in the vernacular, Lingala, the language of everyday
discourse among ordinary people in Kinshasa. The second aspect of the
group is its relationship to the sphere of politics and institutional power. Here,
FIGURE 8.2. Le Groupe Amos installation, “Documenta 11,” Germany, June–September 2002.