The installation by Sammy Baloji "Essay on Urban Planning" (2013) demonstrates how colonial entomology and the urbanisation of the city of Lumbumbashi are intertwined. The works spans out like a chessboard made up of twelve colour photographic prints alternating current aerial views of Lubumbashi and images from the city's entomological museum. Next to this montage is an extract from the 1931 text "L’Urbanisme au Katanga", which examines segregationist urban planning and the construction of a cordon sanitaire separating white and black residential areas based on mosquito fly patterns. The aim is to create a dialogue between this photographic work and Matthieu Abonnenc's Sector IX B (2015) which tells a fictional narrative on insects in the ethnographic collections of the musée de l’Homme currently under renovation. These works could be compared to that of Hugh Raffles on the presence of insects in New-York apartments.

Following a morning of discussion between and with these two artists, the floor will be given to anthropologists and curators working on the management of insects in museums and cities today. This discussion will address the methods of containment used and the cohabitation of humans and insects in these two ecologies.

Study day organised by the Department of Research at the musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in collaboration with the Labex CAP and Labex Patrima.