Nelson Makengo’s Nuit Debout: Infrastructures Between Promise and Improvisation

This article discusses Nelson Makengo’s twenty-minute video work Nuit Debout
(2019), which documents power outages in the city of Kinshasa (DRC) and the
everyday and informal practices people develop to cope with these instances of
infrastructural fallout. More specifically, through a close formal analysis of Nuit
Debout alongside relevant theoretical accounts from various perspectives and
disciplines, it argues that Makengo’s video conveys a sense of how the Kinshasa
inhabitants it portrays are suspended between what has been called ‘the promise of infrastructure’ on the one hand, and the necessity of acts of infrastructural improvisation on the other. As will be demonstrated, this is a suspension between two different temporalities – each with their seemingly incommensurable rhythms and exigencies – that coil and come together in the present as pictured in Nuit Debout, often leading to a sense of stuckness or to impasse. Throughout the article, it will be made clear that Makengo’s piece qualifies, challenges, and troubles the notion – commonly found in academic literature on infrastructure – that infrastructure is ‘normally’ invisible by focusing on the lives and experiences of people who are themselves routinely invisibilized.