Through this research and creation project, Lenyema approaches the Luba sound archives present in the AfricaMuseum collections in two ways: firstly as a sociological tool, by confronting his hypotheses – linked to his father’s career – with the narratives, fictional or not, that may accompany them, and secondly as a musical object, by exploiting the interactions that may result from the confrontation between his rhythmic preoccupations – centred on polyrhythm, the use of complex rhythms – and the load, both technical and aesthetic, that these sound objects carry. By ‘rhythmic traces’, an exercise from which Lenyema also projects himself into the colonial past in order to understand the context in which these objects entered the Western space and what were the intentions, natural or otherwise, that accompanied the musicologists in recording the compositions of their subjects, one should understand: an episodic preoccupation with exploring the sociomusicological foundations of the Luba sound archives; foundations considered as a starting point from which a link with an erased or abandoned memory can be established.

In collaboration with Africamuseum