Nelson Makengo’s Nuit Debout and Toujours Debout: Infrastructure Between Promise and Improvisation: Paper presented at Association for Art History, Annual Conference 2023, University College London

Nelson Makengo’s video works Nuit Debout (2019) and Toujours Debout (2021) document electricity outages in the DRC’s capital city of Kinshasa. More specifically, the works examine how these regular outages are negotiated and dealt with by the inhabitants of certain Kinshasa neighbourhoods, where infrastructural breakdown and fallout constitute the norm rather than the
exception. As such, Makengo’s work challenges and qualifies assertions, found in many scholarly accounts on the topic, that infrastructure is a particularly elusive ‘object’ due to its purported tendency to remain below the threshold of conscious perception. Infrastructures, when operational, are routinely claimed to recede into the unexamined and unthough background of the quotidian. Their ordinary workings are not actively processed, registered, and considered by the people who make use of them, it is argued, until a disruption occurs. However, as Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, and Akhil Gupta have pointed out,“the very idea of ‘disruption’ operates with the assumption that quietly working infrastructures are ‘normal’.” Nuit Debout and Toujours Debout provide this assumption—evidently biased toward Western contexts—with a welcome corrective. I want to argue, through a close reading of both video pieces alongside relevant theoretical accounts, that Makengo’s work does so particularly by picturing the everyday habits, practices, and struggles of a population suspended between what has been called “the promise of infrastructure,” on the one hand, and the reality of those informal and improvisational processes that render “people as
nfrastructure,” to quote AbdouMaliq Simone, on the other.