CATPC

In 1911, Belgium granted Unilever (then Lever Brothers) control over 67,800 square kilometers of land in what then constituted the Belgian Congo. Over the following century, the Dutch-Anglo company razed entire forests to cultivate palm oil harvested by indigenous communities coerced into labor. When, in 2010, Unilever sold its last depleted Congolese plantations for $3.8 million, its workers were dispatched to continue producing palm oil for the company’s subsidiaries. According to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, these companies—running plantations in Congo but holding offices on the Cayman Islands and monitored by British and Dutch development banks—pay men $18 a month and women as little as $9 a month for full-time work.

Over the last hundred years, the immense wealth extracted from these plantations has found its way into arts institutions through sponsorship and investments. Many museums hailed as epicenters of aesthetics and critique—from Tate Modern in London to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne—were founded with plantation profits and continue, at least in part, to depend on them for financial support. These “white cubes” are prisms of ecological ruin, racial violence, and inequality. Even efforts to invite artists critical of climate change, inequality, or colonialism do little to alter the realities of those in Congo and elsewhere who reap few benefits from the critical discourse held in these institutions.

As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay states, “it is impossible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world.” On Unilever’s very first palm oil plantation in Lusanga – then: Leverville – CATPC makes art about their past and their visions of the future. With its income, they buy back the depleted plantation land, and restore the sacred forest. CATPC calls this the Post-Plantation.