Printed booklet with audio track presented in the exhibition The Urban Cultures of Global Players, NGBK Berlin, 12.11.2011 – 8.1.2012.

The Laman Encounter is the output of an informal meeting between Gilles Aubry and members of the University Center of Missiology (CUM) in Kinshasa, DRC, in July 2011. The goal of the meeting was to engage into a discussion around one single photograph displaying Swedish missionary Karl Edvard Laman with a phonograph in front an assembly of Congolese people in 1910. The participants comment on colonial encounters, modern audio technology, and on the progressive appropriation of this technology by Congolese churches for evangelization purposes. The discussion transforms into a collective reflection on the participants’ respective practice, as missionaries and as ethnographers.

Participants: Gilles Aubry (artist), the Pastor Sylvain Bongese (librarian of the CUM), the Reverend Delphin Kapay (Assistant Professor at the CUM), Jean-Claude Elumba (chaplain of the CUM), Innocent Kabesha (PhD student of the CUM) and Bienvenue Nkelani (writer and alumni of the CUM).