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Paper short abstract:

Albert Lubaki, a Congolese artist active in the 1920s-1930s in the Belgian Congo, had his work exhibited in Europe for almost a century. However, his personal story was obscured by colonial patrons. This paper proposes strategies to reconstruct his biography using alternative sources and methods.

Paper long abstract:

Albert Lubaki (c. 1896 – after 1939) was a Congolese watercolor painter working under European patronage. Since 1929, his artworks were widely exhibited in European salons, galleries, and museums. His personal story, unlike the “exoticism” of his artworks, did not, however, interest audiences and the patrons. Consequently, the information about his life is scarce, and his biography up to this day is incomplete, mainly consisting of place names and anecdotes.

This paper is going to explore different ways of approaching the collection of biographical information about people who lived in a not-too-distant past. Firstly, it will comment on the specificity of archival research and the lack of documents relating to Congolese individuals. Then, it will touch upon fieldwork as a means of attempting to fill the archival gaps by finding descendants of the artists. Lastly, it will examine how “researching around” can help us gain an understanding of what people in a similar position to the artist might have been doing, thereby constructing a sort of speculative social biography.

As a result, it is hoped to open a discussion into methods of historical anthropology and how a combination of archival research, fieldwork, and literature study could help us look through a new lens on a story that has remained largely unquestioned and unexplored.