Bodys Isek Kingelez's architectural beauties.
Being a good driver, running a government efficiently and planning the layout of a town are topics on which nearly everyone has an opinion. If the latter is your pet subject, visit the exhibition “Bodys Isek Kingelez—Extreme Modelle” at the Villa Stuck. Here, around 20 fantastically colorful and carefully constructed model buildings and city layouts are on display, all created by Kingelez, an African teacher turned visionary architect of urban spaces.Kingelez, the oldest of nine children, was brought up in a rural farming community in the Congo. From an early age he seems to have viewed himself as someone out of the ordinary, and in interviews he professes to have special, even supernatural gifts. After finishing high school and deciding against a life in the priesthood, the young Kingelez crossed the Congo River into Zaire, settling in Kinshasa. Free from family ties and unfulfilled by work and studies, he began searching for ways to express himself and, as he put it, to “do something for the future of Africa.” One day, with no particular plan in mind, he began building a miniature house out of paper. The results were so impressive that when his work was shown to curators at a museum, Kingelez was accused of plagiarism. Disappointed but not discouraged, he carried on with his work, finally receiving official recognition in the late 1980s, when the French curator André Magnin brought his work to Europe.
The miniature mock-ups at the Villa Stuck are mounted on white blocks in whitewashed rooms, creating an initial impression of glittering, gaudy islands of color. Once you move closer, however, the complex construction and painstaking attention to detail are truly impressive, never mind that the materials are mostly paper, cardboard and plywood. Papillon de Mer (Butterfly of the Sea) of 1990–91 resembles a Miami resort hotel gone mad: four wings featuring sculpted edges decorated with black waves fan out from a narrow central block. The wings are further adorned with dots, grids and crosses and yet, however contradictory this may sound, the effect of the whole is harmonious and pleasing. Similarly Etoile Rouge Congolaise (Red Star of the Congo; 1990) may recall at first glance an ornately decorated birthday cake, but if you look more closely it becomes clear that this is not hobby art. This model commands attention and contains unmistakable architectural references.
Pinpointing influences in Kingelez’s work is more difficult. In the foreword of the catalogue the artist makes the somewhat dishonest claim that his work is beyond memory and allusion, leaving viewers to their own interpretations. So what do we see if we look at the cityscape Ville Fantôme (Ghost City; 1996)? Plenty of glittering skyscrapers, curvaceous postmodern pavilions, multi-colored plazas, countless contours and colors and, interestingly, a complete lack of nature.
What is not made clear in the exhibition is whether Kingelez’s creations are intended to be blueprints of realized buildings or proposals for a new African architecture. The catalogue tells us that such buildings do already exist: “they are built everyday in all corners of Africa by homeowners who bypass so-called architects and design for themselves with the aid of technical draftsmen new palaces to match their outlandish dreams.” If Kingelez’s designs were intended to be realized, he no doubt found himself facing that conundrum that bedevils every architect or city planner: how well will a model or plan translate into bricks and mortar? The history of urban architecture is littered with great architects, many of whom found their visionary ideas mired by the strictures of reality. When Le Corbusier, for example, created the city of Chandigarh in the Punjab region of northern India in the 1950s, he and Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister of India, had high hopes of what they thought would be a revolutionary new townscape. In fact the project turned out to be a city dweller’s nightmare, a classic example of how badly vision and reality can clash. Predictable, if you consider that Le Corbusier had no first-hand experience of living conditions in India. Here at least Kingelez is at an advantage, working on home territory.
Perhaps a clue to Kingelez’s intentions lies in the title of the exhibition. His models should perhaps therefore be seen simply as one man’s rather extreme view of urban life, the work of an eccentric but gifted dilettante. Standing in front of the Industria da Pharmacia (1992), imagining the heat and dust of an African day and the effect of the sun on the blue pavement and domes, a kind of Brave New World feeling is evoked, all the better for being imagined and not really experienced.
