Villa Albertine Resident Armelle Tulunda at SCAD: The Bakongo Cosmogram and the Four Realms of Time

Armelle Tulunda’s artistic practice explores questions of identity, memory, and belonging through astronomy and ancestral Congolese cosmologies. Observing the night sky and reconnecting with Congolese beliefs and legends, her work creates a bridge between personal history and collective memory. Her practice often inhabits a space of paradox, reflecting her experience of being born in France to Congolese parents. Moving between light and darkness, scientific knowledge and personal narrative, Tulunda draws inspiration from satellite imagery and NASA materials while employing craft-based techniques. In continuity with her Perspectives installation series, her research in Savannah investigates the traces of Congolese cosmology preserved among enslaved communities in the American South, despite centuries of colonial erasure. Tulunda (born 1994 in Colombes, France) lives and works in the Paris region. Her work has been presented at venues, including Mucem (Marseille), the Mulhouse Photo Biennale, Hangar Y (Meudon), the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy, La Villette (Paris), CAC – La Synagogue de Delme, and Ugly Duck (London). She received support from the Grand Est Region’s Emerging Visual Arts program in 2021 and 2023, as well as a mobility grant from the Goethe-Institut and the European Union.