I was invited by my friend to watch this documentary ‘Enjoy Poverty’ by Renzo Martens, in 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Renzo’s way of defining poverty touches everyone who watch the movie. The clipping neon sign in the movie, sarcastically turning everyone into quiet and start to think after the movie.
For two years, Dutch artist Renzo Martens travelled around Congo, from the capital of Kinshasa to deep into the interior. Employing a casual film style, camera in hand, he makes his way around the poverty-fighting industry in the post-civil war country and regularly appears onscreen himself. He films UN peacekeepers in their SUVs providing security for an international company so it can mine gold; corpses of gold-digging rebels surrounded by Western photographers, white relief workers happily taking pictures of the recipients of their emergency aid, with their logo on every canvas tent they hand out; a large landowner at a photo exhibition looking at pictures of his day labourers, who don’t even earn enough to feed their children. It all amounts to one conclusion: poverty is there to stay, and “fighting it” is an industry from which the poor benefit very little. Martens then launches a self-styled emancipation programme: he teaches the Congolese poor that “images of poverty” are their country’s most lucrative natural resource. Under Martens’ guidance, local photographers start photographing malnourished children instead of wedding parties. He mounts a neon sign in the middle of the forest that reads “Enjoy Poverty,” so that the poor can reap its financial fruits as well. The local population dances frenetically, but in the end, adversity won’t be held at bay for long.
I just recently saw Martens` documentary “Enjoy Poverty “ on Finnish TV. I was touched not by the subject alone but his courage in handling it. Martens raised an important case that at least some of those locals (photographers) could earn good money but it was stopped due to bureaucracy and hypocrisy. That fact that local people are forbidden to earn good money shows the core of our world: that money would have helped many more around them and it would have created a small money flow, but instead they have to stay poor so that the companies can raise enormous profits.
Martens brought that forward very plainly.
There are solutions to this reality.
I have proven this as reality both on theoretical and practical levels in my book “the Subversion”, which is about the current Western economical crisis, in English.
Martens` work is important.
Esa T. Kemppainen
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