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Power 100

Most influential people in 2025 in the contemporary artworld

82

Cercle D’Art Des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise

Artist Collective - Pursuing practical, real-world change

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From left: Olele Mulela Mabamba, Irène Kanga, Huguette Kilembi, Jérémie Mabiala, Jean Kawata, Mbuku Kimpala, Ced’art Tamasala and Matthieu Kasiama. © CATPC, 2020. Courtesy White Cube

The group of former plantation workers, now artists and activists, are based in Lusanga, formerly known as Leverville, named for the Unilever plantation on which its 23 members once worked. There they develop their practical critique of the artworld’s postcolonial ties and legacies. With funds from the sale of artworks (often fashioned from commodity crops such as cacao and palm oil), CATPC is buying back local plantation land to return it to sustainable agroforestry; this year collectors could buy into this circular economy via the collective’s institutional appearances in group shows at the National Asian Culture Center, Gwangju; K21, Düsseldorf; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. For a solo show at Amsterdam’s Van Abbemuseum, CATPC took its agenda to former tobacco plantations in Sumatra – which made Henri van Abbe a very rich man – and recently launched a toolkit for other such workers to make their own case. After all, as CATPC point out, the top-down process of decolonising museums has ‘had surprisingly little impact for the communities whose labor financed many of these very institutions’.

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