Cabinet des confidences Populaires

Transforming a Congolese street vending booth into a platform for popular critique, Baba-Ali reclaims this everyday object as a tool to amplify local voices. Installed across Lubumbashi’s city center, the Cabinet de confidences populaires — or Booth of Popular Confessions — gathers messages of discontent from residents through a young man seated inside, performing the role of an official clerk.

These collected critiques are later displayed as proverbs, translated into Hindi, Arabic, and Chinese, and presented to expats arriving at Lubumbashi’s airport — the gateway to Katanga, a region turned into a modern-day Wild West by waves of international investors. Here, the local population has been both exploited by and alienated from the global forces shaping their lives.

With this action, Baba-Ali gives voice to the Lushois, highlighting the tensions between local realities and global capital through the lens of language, performance, and popular resistance.