Fransix Tenda Lomba

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).