Article 15 Filming Locations

Marie Reinert, an expert in the art of infiltration - a term she used, incidentally, as a title for one of her long-term projects - explores gestures and movement in the workplace, the body as a tool and the economy as a system - these are her raw materials. Here, the space she infiltrates is the informal economy of Kinshasa, examined through the eyes of the artists: Chris Shongo, Jerry Lelo, Francis Longwa, Magloire Mpaka, Olikas Ngongo and Margot Oto, a group which celebrated the occasion by giving itself the name System K, which signifies that everything can be haggled for in Kinshasa. It opens with a telephone, enhanced with an improvised home-made handle which is passed from hand to hand. First off is a breath-taking high-angle shot, followed through by the camera riveted to every single body, merging with their movements, splintering our attention and points of view and recording the logic of their gestures and motion. The rhythm, delegated to these bodies at work, develops randomly with their comings and goings: the jolts of a stonemason's shovel, the spins of a hairdresser cutting away, a travelling shot of a motorbike deliveryman, the ground as seen from shoes being shined and even screens in a cybercafé. An epic immersion into the megalopolis, like a surgeon's knife revealing the entrails and pulse of an organism in perpetual motion; it is as though we are caught up in its lively energy and fluctuating exchanges, like the glimpsed at banknotes that changed hands non-stop. This journey is made possible through this collective, collaborative effort whose initial protocol allows for a network as tightly run as it is unpredictable, and which goes as far as to absorb the work of the film, going back on itself, as its classic credits suggest. A typical day which unfolds like a vast topography of everyday labour as required by Article 15, a made-up article of the constitution of the RDC, referring to resourcefulness.