Christian Tembele Turns a Vacant Lot into an Altar of Ashes

By Udemma Chukwuma 

Christian Tembele enters already transformed, his body wrapped and his face entirely obscured beneath a fan of palm fronds. In a costume that reads less like disguise and more like abdication, he empties himself of his own individual identity so that he can become an officiant, a vessel through whom grief for absent parents can move rather than a performer grieving on their behalf. 

Palm carries funerary and processional weight across both Kongo tradition and Christian liturgy, and Tembele leans into both registers at once, never resolving which one is speaking. What he does instead, physically, is submit. He crawls, kneels, crouches, and at one point collapses face-down into the dirt, his frond skirt splayed out like something pinned to the ground. These aren't performed emotions for an audience. They read as gestures of debt being paid to the earth itself, the same earth everyone eventually returns to.

“Fête des Parents, marked on August 1st, is, on paper, a day for honouring the people who raised us.” His performance, staged for Collectif MPIKO on a mound of red laterite earth behind a cinderblock wall crowned in razor wire, takes that simple premise and refuses to let it stay small. This is not a performance about one father or one mother. It is a performance that insists the word parent has to be large enough to hold everyone who shaped us and was taken from us, blood family and national ancestors alike. It makes that argument with its body, its materials, and its fire before it ever needs to say it in words.

That debt becomes literal on the mound, which is unmistakably grave-shaped, its surface studded with photographs held down by stones. And here the piece keeps its promise to Fête des Parents rather than drifting into abstraction; the photographs are not a uniform gallery of famous dead people. An elderly man in a plain collared shirt, photographed against a brick wall, is clearly someone's actual father or grandfather, a private parent, unnamed and unglamorous. A young man in a blue cap and jacket, casual and contemporary, is just as plainly someone Tembele knew and lost personally, closer to a sibling or a peer than a historical icon. Alongside them, deliberately, sit Kimpa Vita, the Kongolese prophetess burned alive on July 2, 1706, rendered here in the halo-and-colour-block style of a devotional card, and Patrice Lumumba, pictured both mid-motorcade under colonial escort and in a stark, direct close-up.

By burying and burning these four kinds of loss side by side, Tembele is making the case that Lumumba and Kimpa Vita are parents too not metaphorically, but functionally: ancestors who fed something into the people who came after them, exactly as a mother or father does, and who were taken exactly as violently and exactly as early as too many private parents in that same city have been. The mound becomes an argument that national and household grief are not separate categories that require separate days. They are owed the same unfinished mourning, and Fête des Parents is wide enough to hold both.

The fire is where that argument reaches its clearest expression. Tembele plants a crude cross at the head of the mound, lashed together from branches, with a pale fragment bound to its crossbeam and eventually sets it burning, flame licking up against the block wall as smoke drifts past the razor wire. Watching printed photographs blacken and curl in open flame is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to witness, and that discomfort is doing the work: it's the closest a viewer gets to feeling what it might mean to actually lose these people, rather than simply being told to remember them. The setting refuses to let any of this feel ceremonial in the safe, sanitised sense. 

This is not a cemetery or a church. It's a rubble-strewn vacant lot with washing lines and tin roofs visible over the wall, ordinary neighbourhood life carrying on unbothered at the frame's edge. That refusal of consecrated ground is itself part of the tribute, a suggestion that honouring parents doesn't require a proper shrine, only red dirt, patience, and a willingness to sit with what's been lost.

If the piece asks anything of its viewer, it's a certain amount of historical fluency; without knowing who Kimpa Vita was, some of the weight of placing her beside an unnamed grandfather is easy to miss. But that's a minor cost against what the performance achieves: a Fête des Parents tribute that finally admits parenthood was never only biological, and treats the martyrs of a nation's memory with the same tenderness owed to the ordinary dead sitting in a family photo album. Collectif MPIKO describes its own practice as "art in service of memory, transmission, and humanity"; on this evidence, that isn't a slogan so much as a working method.