Symphonies from Destruction: Kinshasa in Action by KinAct

Congolese collective build sonic starships ouf of the scrapyards of Africa, transforming ritual into auditory assault. All photos by Violaine Morgan Le Fur

Kinshasa isn’t the kind of city that waits for you to be ready, the city just takes over your experience. It is a metropolis of staggering contradictions, where the ghosts of Belgian colonialism collide with the relentless, vibrating hustle of hyper-capitalism. To attempt to capture the essence of this place on tape seems like a fool’s errand, yet this is exactly what the Kinshasa-based street art collective KINACT have achieved with their debut LP, Kinshasa in Action. Founded in 2015 by Eddy Ekete, KinAct first made their name not on stage, but in the gutters, markets, and intersections of the Congolese capital. They transformed public spaces into living, breathing theatres of the absurd, constructing elaborate regalia from the city’s discarded detritus, bottles, wires, tires, and dismembered dolls. Theirs was a visual language of survival, bearing witness to rampant pollution, gendered violence, and postcolonial scars. Now, released via the essential incubator of African avant-garde music, Nyege Nyege Tapes, the collective has successfully collapsed their visual rituals into an auditory assault, proving that the tools of making can seamlessly double as weapons of rhythm.

The genesis of this auditory translation occurred in 2022, when a core group of KinAct members travelled to Kampala for a two-month residency at Nyege Villa. For a collective whose entire identity was predicated on the kinetic energy of street processions and visual shock tactics, entering a traditional recording studio could have been a sterilizing experience. Instead, led by Ekete, they actively corrupted the space. They turned the pristine Nyege studio into a makeshift, scrap-metal workshop. Costumes were dismantled and repurposed as percussion; power tools, drills, circular saws, hammers, and nails, were violently integrated with homemade xylophones and improvised drums. The resulting body of work is inextricably welded to the Congolese scenes. It is shockingly contemporary, yet it vibrates with an ancient political significance that interrogates the future of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the wider continent. It is the sound of a society’s refuse being hammered into something transcendent.

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