140 years have passed since the Berlin Congo- or Africa Conference, a gathering of the European great powers as well as the USA and the then-Ottoman Empire, where the division of the African continent was decided. The consequences are felt to this day: arbitrary border drawings that lead to ever-new wars, exploitation of natural resources, destruction of traditional ties. The art and discourse platform Savvy Contemporary, based in the Wedding district, draws attention with the exhibition “Desacta” to the consequences of the looting of material and spiritual resources.
“We are aiming for a counter-spell against this conference,” says Hajra Haider Karrar, one of the five curators of the exhibition. The treaty has “exerted an enormous influence on geography, economy, and society.” With the exhibition, “the destroyed nature, the extracted resources, and also the desecrated mythologies will be honored,” Karrar adds.
The document, the Congo Act, comprised only 32 pages in the Reich Law Gazette of 1885. It was signed in the then Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstraße. Today, a late-Socialist panel building stands at that site. An information plaque on the sidewalk at least points to the world-historic event.
The treaty established, in a kind of first-touch rule, that the areas of Africa that were entered first by representatives of the signatory powers should belong to them. Following this, a rush of expeditions—partly privately financed and partly state-financed—began to plant flags in African soil, establish trading posts and military outposts.
Significant Consequences
The political and economic consequences of this capitalist race in Africa had already been examined by Savvy Contemporary about ten years ago in the exhibition “We Are All Berliners.” “That happened for the first time within the local art context,” emphasizes Anna Jäger, then active at Savvy and now one of the curators of “Desacta.” The current exhibition thus aims to go a step further, beyond the purely factual and rational. “We look at the desecrations of objects and territories. It is like a curse laid upon the earth,” Jäger says. Part of the colonial exploitation of Africa was also the looting of religious objects and mortal remains.
Even the Ethnologisches Museum’s collections contain around 50,000 artifacts from Africa, which arrived in Europe during the colonial period between 1886 and 1919 through more or less violent means. Before the Congo Conference, according to Paola Ivanov, a curator at the Ethnologisches Museum, there were only 3,361 African objects in the collections. Clarifying the origins of all these objects is necessary. After all, in October 2025 the federal government, states, and municipalities agreed on new joint guidelines for handling cultural goods and human remains from colonial contexts.
The guidelines emphasize research into the provenance of cultural goods and especially the mortal remains from the former colonies, of which several thousand are cataloged in Berlin museums. Civil society initiatives Berlin Postkolonial, Decolonize Berlin, and Flinn Works criticize, however, that even in these new guidelines “colonial appropriations are not fundamentally considered illegitimate” and thus “returns remain discretionary decisions of the collecting institutions.” From the new memorial concept proposed by Culture State Minister Wolfram Weimer, the colonial heritage was entirely removed—a backward step in historical policy.
That is why a project like “Desacta” becomes even more relevant. It began with a ritual in Guinea-Bissau. “It is a Balanta ceremony. It is usually performed after a good harvest. Yet good harvests have been rare in the last 20 years due to climate change. Nevertheless, the ritual was carried out so that the younger generation would not lose knowledge of the tradition. The younger people were also asked to hold the elders accountable for their mistakes,” explains Billy Fowo, another curator of “Desacta” and on site at the Malafo ceremony in Guinea-Bissau. Insights into the ceremony are provided by the eponymous film by Filipa César. Objects that the Malafo community donated are also on display in the exhibition. They serve, according to Fowo, as a kind of portal connecting Berlin and Malafo.
The exhibition comprises a total of 13 works. The range is broad, from an astrological-inspired counter-spell to documentary films and installations to an artistic transformation of a herbarium. The Congolese artist Sammy Baloji took pressed and dried plants that the first local botanist Paul Panda Farnana collected in Kongo as the basis for creating copper plants. They resemble the original plants. The material copper references the numerous mining activities in the area. Because copper easily corrodes and then takes on a greenish tint, these metallic plants seem to have a life of their own. In the documentary film “Pungulume,” Baloji shows how mining has affected the living environment of the communities there for several generations.
The exhibition, however, ends with an optimistic outlook. The Moroccan artist Hassan Darsi presents in a documentary film how a rural community successfully resisted a powerful mining project.
In Berlin, the hoped-for successes continue to be slow in coming. On Wilhelmstraße, on the site of the Africa Conference, there was for a short time a project space by Berlin Dekolonial. Last year, however, the landlord announced the termination, ending the site-specific memory project. Currently the spaces stand empty—apparently a sign that even rental income is forgone to slow down a politically controversial project.
