YURUGU – INVISIBLE LINES emerges from a practice of care.
I began this film alone, but as the process unfolded, I realized that the very subject of YURUGU – the violence of separation, fragmentation and dismembering produced by colonial modernity – could not be held, nor told, from a singular position. To continue alone would have contradicted the film’s own ethics.
Inviting Laurent Van Lancker into this project became an act of alignment rather than collaboration in the conventional sense. It was a conscious decision to embody a culture of sharing as a practice of balance, reciprocity and living knowledge. This story demanded to be told from a meeting point – where perspectives cross, unsettle and listen to one another. Working with Laurent opened a sacred space of exchange, allowing the film to breathe through multiplicity rather than authorship as possession. The process itself became one of gathering: filmed images, gifted footage, colonial archives, hacked images, and viral videos – each carrying its own charge, history and responsibility.
Colonialism and capitalism not only extracted resources, they severed relations.
As a native of the Kivu region in the Congo, I have witnessed – intimately and repeatedly – the brutality of dismembering: people from the land, people from memory, humans from non-humans. Colonialism and capitalism not only extracted resources, they severed relations. They cut invisible lines that once held worlds together. YURUGU is not an attempt to repair these lines in a restorative or nostalgic sense, but to re-member them – literally to bring back together what was torn apart.
Cinema, for me, is not a tool of representation but a ritual space. A place where remembering can be activated as a collective, embodied act. Through ancestral ecology and the ritualization of sharing – of food, labour, stories and gestures – this film composts the colonial gaze by decomposing it. Disorientation, texture, dreams and sensory fractures are not aesthetic choices for abstraction’s sake; they are strategies of refusal. They ask the viewer to slow down, to unlearn, to feel rather than consume.
YURUGU follows the logic of Ejo Lobi cinema – a narrative form where past and future fold into one another, where time is cultivated rather than mastered. This work is an invitation: to sit with what has been dismembered, to listen to what persists beneath rupture and to imagine cinema as a living practice of relation, care and remembrance.
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Petna invited me to participate in the project following a long discussion we had on the concept of Ejo Lobi cinema and my interest in emancipatory, subversive narrative structures in cinema.
Dreams are a way to go beyond timescapes, and to connect past and future as much as to connect humans and non-humans.
YURUGU became a fertile terrain for re-calibrating aesthetics and narrative forms through collaborative editing and sharing filming practices. Dreams are a way to go beyond timescapes, and to connect past and future as much as to connect humans and non-humans. A connection also sought through thermic images that blur the lines and appearances between species.
YURUGU is a film that re-searches. Re-search to resonate, to alternate, to emancipate, to subvert, to recalibrate, to sense. Sensory, synesthetic, haptic modalities. Re-search the relation between forms and contents, intentions and structures, narrations and knowledges, politics and poetics, images and imaginations. Recoding perceptions. Beyond textuality, linearity, hierarchy, patriarchy, causality, conflicts, climaxes. Forms of knowledge through narrative structure – as epistemology.
YURUGU is poethical cinema. Poethical is a term combining poetics and ethics, often used to describe creative practices that are simultaneously aesthetic and ethical – where how something is expressed is inseparable from what it does in the world.
Laurent Van Lancker
