The project "Ecologies of Indigenous Filmmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo" situate films by/on PAP-communities (Peuples Autochtones Pygmées) within a wider, cross-disciplinary scholarly conversation spanning film studies, environmental humanities, political ecology, and Indigenous Studies, so as to build a systematic account of Congolese indigenous filmmaking looking at their philosophical, political, aesthetic, and cosmological relevance.
The research does not approach PAP communities as exotic objects situated outside modernity, but as research partners and full-fledged actors who bear the brunt of modernity’s most violent forms and bitter paradoxes. On the one hand, PAP communities are regularly expelled from their lands because of mining or logging extractivism (sometimes ironically for minerals supplying the transition to so-called “Green Economies”), or in the name of nature conservation, to allow major polluters to offset their emissions by turning their territories into carbon sinks. Dispossessed of ways of life that were (and still are) often sustainable and low in carbon intensity, they are frequently forced to participate in extractivist economies that destroy ecosystems. On the other hand, PAP communities are being romanticized and instrumentalized by the industries of the “Green Savior Complex.” Their worldviews of “harmony with nature” are increasingly framed as “solutions” to the ecological crisis for which the Western industrial part of the world and its racial capitalism are responsible. With the intensification of the crises, PAP’s symbolic capital has increased, as many turn to “indigenous” ways of imagining and inhabiting the world as a response to the crisis of (Western) imagination and culture, which is rooted in the ontological limits of modern naturalism and which explains Western societies’ inability to respond effectively to the environmental crisis.
As such, analogous to indigeneity ranging from Ainus to Sami and First Nations, PAP communities are simultaneously invoked as an antidote to the Anthropocene, instrumentalized as its impossible redemption, and positioned as a subliminal expression of a Western fractured relation to land. In sum, PAP communities are constructed as ecological salvation while being victims of environmental racism, on top of the social racism they already endure. Yet their practices and knowledges contain conceptual resources capable of counterbalancing the hegemony of growth-centered ideologies, while also unsettling the Western tendency to compensate for its own destruction through a romanticized fascination with indigeneity as a promise of salvation.
PAP communities endure the entanglement of racism and environmental racism, even as they stand at the forefront of struggles for land, forests, and livable futures. By foregrounding their aesthetic cosmologies not as static heritage but as dynamic and critical forms of thought, this research proposed to reframe PAP worlds as vital sites of theory, creativity, and planetary politics. PAP does not designate an identity category, but rather a dynamic constellation of cosmologies, worldviews, aesthetic practices, struggles, and modes of existence articulated at the frontlines of ecological devastation, extractivism, conservation violence, and marginalization. At the same time, it foregrounds PAP forms of resilience, creativity, relationality, and agency, from the local to pan-indigenous networks. The research engages seriously with their ontologies, cosmovisions, ecological practices, artistic expressions, and political thought as generative sites of theory and critique in their own right while questioning instrumentalizations of indigeneity.
