In L’Arbre de l’authenticité, Sammy Baloji explores questions of shared heritage, the impact of colonisation on nature and the responsibility of Congolese, western and global societies for finding a solution to the climate crisis.

The film is set in the heart of the biggest tropical forest in Africa, where one of the most important tropical agricultural research centres in the world is located. Sited on the banks of the River Congo, at its peak the INERA research station in Yangambi was a prosperous scientific centre. Today it is a tangle of forest and ruins, where issues of knowledge, and of power over and access to it persist. Its vestiges show the weight of the colonial part and its inextricable links with climate change.

The film is related to Baloji’s workAequare, part of Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, in which the artist uses visual and historic contrasts to question the rhetoric of “acclimatisation” and “progress” used by the European colonisers to justify territorial, scientific and economic domination.