For Episode III – ‘Enjoy Poverty’ Renzo Martens travelled with his video camera to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a humanitarian disaster has been taking place for many years now. Among other things, his film shows how development organisations and Western photographers create a biased media report of that situation. Martens confronts the public with the fact that the Africans themselves do not profit from the images that foreign photographers take of them. On the contrary: like gold and luxury goods, even the images of poverty, the most lucrative export product, are out of the Congelese reach; as they are exclusively exploited by the Western ‘poverty industry’. As an answer to this injustice, Martens starts a development project for Congolese photographers; a project that is doomed to failure.
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