Unraveling the colonial invisible: Belgium’s war <i>patrimoine</i> and dermographic memory in Sammy Baloji’s <i>L’Autre mémorial</i>

This article explores how L’Autre mémorial (2015), a copper sculpture by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, challenges Belgian’s patrimoine surrounding World War I memory. L’Autre mémorial replicates the copper dome of the Sacré-Coeur de Cointe (Liège, Belgium), a patrimoine site built in 1936 as church and memorial for First World War Belgian soldiers. Embossing his sculpture with scarified copper plaques, Baloji honors the erased memory of Congolese soldiers coercively enrolled in the East African campaign (1914–1918) and recalls Belgium’s brutal exploitation of the Katanga copper mines in Congo. Exploring the symbolic and material uses of copper in L’Autre mémorial , I argue that this sculpture performs what I term dermographic memory, a method of inscribing erased decolonial histories back into extracted materials to process the violence that colonizers’ narratives have silenced. Adopting a decolonial approach to francophone memory studies in the wake of Etienne Achille and Pascal Blanchard, I explore how dermographic memory can become an aesthetic and methodological tool against what I call the colonial invisible , i.e. the ramifications of coloniality that are so ubiquitous that they are paradoxically overlooked. An examination of the materiality of L’Autre mémorial ’s dermographic memory notably opens up discussions on the pervasive and invisible colonial nature of digital forms of patrimoine , which are sustained by copper too, and which allow the circulation of decolonial memories but also perpetuate global inequality.