KINACT: MARIO TESTINO ENCOUNTERS THE LIVING SCULPTURES OF KINSHASA

At first glance, they do not look human. Their bodies disappear beneath thousands of discarded objects. Plastic bottles. Toothbrushes. Ring-pulls. Fragments of metal and packaging collected from the streets. The debris of modern life assembled into towering figures that seem to belong somewhere between sculpture, ritual and performance.

Then they begin to move. A head turns. An arm lifts. A crowd gathers. Suddenly, what looked like a monument becomes a person. What looked like waste becomes costume. And what looked like waste becomes something closer to wonder.

Founded by Congolese artist Eddy Ekete Mombesa, KinAct is an annual international performance meeting held across the city of Kinshasa. For six weeks, artists transform public space into a site of collective imagination, using their own bodies as living sculptures and inviting passers-by into the creative process. Since 2015, local artists working through the collective Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle have been joined by international participants, creating an evolving dialogue between performance, community and contemporary life.

When Mario Testino travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of A Beautiful World, he immediately recognised something familiar in KinAct's energy.

A year earlier, in Panama, he had photographed a group of performance artists of Congolese heritage known as The Congos. Though separated by geography, the two encounters felt connected. In both, the body became more than a body. It became a vessel for memory, imagination and transformation.

What makes KinAct extraordinary is not simply the scale of the costumes, but the materials from which they are made. Plastic waste. Crushed cans. Bottle tops. Toothbrushes. Discarded objects that have completed their intended purpose and been cast aside.

In the hands of KinAct's artists, these materials begin a second life.

"He has been taking rubbish collected from the streets and recycling it into his costumes," says Testino. "They are extraordinary. He has turned diverse materials including discarded plastic toothbrushes, ring-pulls from cans and an array of discarded polluting trash into extraordinarily joyful and magical living sculptures."

The transformation is striking. A toothbrush is no longer a toothbrush. A ring-pull is no longer a ring-pull. A plastic bottle is no longer waste. Each object becomes part of something larger than itself.

Standing before these figures, it becomes clear that KinAct is not simply about recycling. It is about possibility. About what can happen when imagination refuses to accept the limits imposed by circumstance.

This spirit runs through the project. KinAct does not separate art from everyday life. The streets of Kinshasa become its stage. The city becomes both material and audience. The encounter between artist and observer becomes part of the work itself.

There is also a deeper resonance to the costumes. Positioned between ancestral traditions, contemporary urban culture and the realities of global consumption, they carry multiple meanings at once. They are playful and serious. Spectacular and critical. Rooted in local experience while speaking to concerns shared around the world.

One of the works photographed by Testino in Kinshasa was later included in A Beautiful World, the exhibition presented at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome in 2024. Displayed alongside photographs from across the globe, the KinAct images offered a powerful example of the project's central concern: how communities express identity, creativity and belonging through dress, ritual and collective acts of imagination. Within the exhibition, the figures stood not as costume alone, but as a portrait of human ingenuity.

Perhaps this is why the figures feel so memorable. They do not ask us to look away from the realities of the present. They begin with them. Waste. Consumption. Pollution. Excess.

Then, through collaboration, creativity and performance, they turn them into something else entirely.

Throughout A Beautiful World, Testino has documented communities, traditions and cultural practices across continents, creating an evolving visual record of how identity is expressed through dress, ceremony, craftsmanship and collective memory. KinAct belongs naturally within that body of work. Not because it preserves the past, but because it demonstrates culture as a living force, continually adapting, responding and reinventing itself.

On the streets of Kinshasa, discarded objects become living sculpture. What seemed finished begins again. And for a moment, the boundaries between artist, city and artwork disappear.