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Full disclosure: four years after watching Renzo Martens’s documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), which served as shock therapy for the art-world in its time, I am still traumatized by it. The point the Dutch artist wanted to convey with this film was that the overexploited residents of remote areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) would do well to enjoy their supposedly most valuable resource: poverty. In the film, Martens sets up a workshop and encourages some impoverished photographers to commodify and sell iterations of their precariousness (such as photographs of starving children) to the highest bidder – just like those Western photojournalists who sensationalize death for a living. Many gruelling scenes later, the experiment fails, but Martens still hosts a sort of party around a purpose-built neon sign that reads: ‘Enjoy Poverty Please’. ....
Full disclosure: four years after watching Renzo Martens’s documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), which served as shock therapy for the art-world in its time, I am still traumatized by it. The point the Dutch artist wanted to convey with this film was that the overexploited residents of remote areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) would do well to enjoy their supposedly most valuable resource: poverty. In the film, Martens sets up a workshop and encourages some impoverished photographers to commodify and sell iterations of their precariousness (such as photographs of starving children) to the highest bidder – just like those Western photojournalists who sensationalize death for a living. Many gruelling scenes later, the experiment fails, but Martens still hosts a sort of party around a purpose-built neon sign that reads: ‘Enjoy Poverty Please’. ....