"Luendu/Journey" live from Kinshasha: Nada Tshibwabwa | Franklin Furnace LOFT
Join Franklin Furnace for a special Congolese lunch and watch party featuring Congolese ARTivist, FUND 2025-26 artist Nada Tshibwabwa.
Hosted by Simba Yangala and live streamed via the Franklin Furnace LOFT, the gathering will introduce New York audiences to Tshibwabwa’s creative practice and socially engaged work while celebrating Congolese culture, community, and artistic resistance.
Co-sponsored by Jungledom Network, with support from Ethical.NYC’s Young Ethical Explorers. Admission is free with reservations. Donations are welcomed for COFECO, an organization supporting Congolese women.
Free, hearty Congolese cuisine prepared by Simba Yangala will be served.
Luendu/Journey, livestreamed from Kinshasa:
"In the ancestral conceptions of my people, we do not only get born once but a few times during our life time. Birth-like rituals are reenactments where the spiritual and the material world converge. For me, artistic and performative practices are also such converging points and moments of transformations. When imbalances are weakening our communities, spirits appear to recreate a prosperous life between humans and all living beings. There is a strong interdependency between the DR Congo’s soil and today’s digital world and communication systems: a vast amount of the resources that fuel the contemporary come from the DR Congo, be it coltan, copper, or other resources.
In the last thirty years, millions of people have died in my country because of the global hunger for these resources. “Luendu” is a performance that revolves around these topics and activates mythological figures to create connections between times and spaces and the possibility to engage beyond recurring violence. It is a reinterpreted birthing ritual that shows the triumph of life over death, of resistance over oppression, of resilience over exploitation." -- Nada Tshibwabwa
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This work is supported by Mwano Studio, Jungledom Network and New York Society for Ethical Culture and is made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace FUND 2025-26, supported by SHS Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the members and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive. Poster by Elsa Westreicher