Michael Disanka’s work is rooted in an intimate heritage: poetry and a love of writing passed down to him by his mother. This new creation pays tribute to her by linking her story to that of the Congo and drawing on kasàlà, a poem of praise from the Kasai culture to which she belonged.

In the art of kasàlà, access to a form of truth requires rotating one’s tongue 77 times. Disanka commits to this: he composes a scenic poem that intertwines his flow of words with a sonic curve; a polyphony woven with sounds recorded in his mother’s village, the history of which was marked by the South Kasai war of secession and its central figure Albert Kalonji. He initially received only a short song about this from his mother—a lullaby linked to a massacre whose meaning he would only come to understand later.

The stories that run through Disanka make his body vibrate, yet he remains motionless in space, the vessel of a story that takes root on stage. An intimate dialogue between a son and his mother becomes a quest to reconstruct a hidden story and reimagine its transmission—to the audience, perhaps, or to his own son. Je suis l'acteur de la poésie de ma mère is the artist’s first solo work, the final part of a trilogy in which he blends his personal history with that of the Congo. A poetic whirlwind dedicated to mourning and memory.