Artist Renzo Martens lectures on Congo’s ‘national asset’. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

A SORT of mad homage to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Enjoy Poverty is the result of Dutch artist Renzo Martens’s three years traveling the Congo, documenting the country’s ongoing plunder by foreign interests and our complicity in the ‘poverty industry’. With a purposefully offensive and pyrrhic logic, Martens suggests that poverty should be considered an important natural resource. Foreign aid is, after all, among the Congo’s largest sources of income. With little more than a handheld digicam, the artist-come-director sets off to interview plantation owners and poor labourers. He also meets with NGO workers and UN staffers, as well as foreign journalists who cover the nation’s internal conflict.

Martens’s footage of suffering is uncompromising and his approach detached. The director does not attempt to empathise with or even understand the Congolese he meets, but instead to illustrate their exploitation. Workers are paid grotesquely low wages so we can buy cheap goods. Soldiers stand guard so foreign companies can extract gold for jewelery. And when victims pile into refugee camps, their tents are stamped with the logos of aid organisations.

However, it’s Martens’s searing critique of the media that is front and centre. He suggests the relationship between journalists and NGOs is interwoven, and that the images of suffering produced go largely unquestioned.

“I find it a very hypocritical situation because none of the profits that these images generate return to the people who deliver the raw material… This makes the exploitation of filmed and photographed poverty a perfect double analogy for rubber, coltan or slave labour,” the director has said.

In order to answer the question ‘who owns poverty?’ Martens develops a plan to personify the ‘poverty industry’. In one of the film’s most difficult sequences he gathers together a group of amateur wedding photographers and convinces them to take photos of dead bodies. If white journalists can get up to $500 for images of bloated corpses, why shouldn’t they? Of course, Martens knows their poorly composed photos won’t sell. His Congolese subjects do not. As he leaves they’re still unaware he’s used them to suggest they cannot be active participants in their own destiny.

On another occasion he confronts a Medicines Sans Frontieres team leaving a village. As the medical staff float away on a barge he juxtaposes the scene with footage of starving babies left behind. His implication is the village has been abandoned, yet we’re never told why they’re leaving. The reasoning might be entirely valid. Again, with overlapping layers of irony Martens demonstrates the Africa portrayed by NGOs and the media is, like his film, only a partial truth.

Later, when the director erects a glowing neon ‘Enjoy Poverty’ sign and mockingly informs a rural village their suffering has made him a better person, his calculated exploitation makes for uncomfortable viewing.

Martens has been keen to stress his film is an artwork, not a documentary, and the gallery is its correct environment. Seen in a cinema then, the film loses much of its context. His subtext about the role of artist as art – demonstrated through a bizarre sequence in which he sings Neil Young’s ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ while porters carry his packs – feels awkwardly positioned. Even the moment in which he acknowledges his own vanity is a cynical wink to camera. Yes I’m profiting from their suffering, he’s saying, but I want you to know I’m doing it deliberately.

Martens’s point about the mutually-dependent nature of the media and aid organisations is well made, as is his contention we’re all complicit through our rampant consumerism and perverse fascination with suffering – but at what cost? Enjoy Poverty is by turns flawed, frustrating, illuminating and thought provoking. Absolutely recommended viewing.