La roue by Francis Alÿs shows a group of Congolese kids playing an extreme game on a huge mountain of mining waste from the former Lubumbashi mine. This spectacular scene—though mostly invisible to our Western eyes—is one of the by-products of our ultra-extractivist civilisation. These little Sisyphi bear the weight of a never-ending colonisation. They climb this unreal black mountain over and over again, as we pursue our exponential growth and our irrepressible need for more and more high-tech (and therefore for mines that are environmental and social cataclysms). I wanted to confront this reality with a distorted and distant echo of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…” aka “Ah! Vous dirais-je, maman…,” the traditional French song that Mozart set to Theme and Variations, but which today is better known to young readers as the “alphabet song.” These two distant visions of childhood remind me of the many cognitive dissonances we experience every day. One of them: who doesn’t know that buying a new smartphone every two years is ecologically unsustainable and leads to disastrous social situations? Yet we need them for work, for administration, for banking, for socialising, for almost everything… The musicians of Cikada even need them to play the piece I wrote for them…

Pierre Slinckx