We proudly supported Congolese artist Hadassa Ngamba’s performance at the Liverpool Biennale 2025: Bedrock in June. This performance results from a research and engagement project called Congo-Liverpool Routes developed through a collaboration between Tate Liverpool and the International Slavery Museum. The project engaged with museum collections and archival material that attest to the historical and present-day connections between the Congo and Liverpool. It involved Congolese communities in Liverpool in rethinking the legacies of past exploitation while imagining roadmaps for different futures.

Watch the highlights of Hadassa’s performance on our YouTube channel here.

About Hadassa’s project

In a dialogue between Congolese ancestral rituals and the contemporary urban space of Liverpool, this performance brings together foundational materials of the city. Sandstone as a geological foundation, and palm oil as a financial one. After the abolition of slavery, palm oil became the UK’s main trading interest in West and Central Africa. Used in machinery and the manufacturing of food, cosmetics and soap, palm oil generated incredible wealth in Liverpool.  

Pathway Ngamba references Congolese ancestral uses of palm oil through Kikumbi, an ancestral fertility ritual in Congo that initiates women in the organisation of family and social structures. During Kikumbi, a balm made of palm oil and red clay is applied to the body. A practice that has gradually faded with the influence of Christianity. Until today, in many regions of Congo, mothers rub palm oil on their babies’ spines to confer protection, strength, and blessings to the newborn. In this performance, Ngamba uses a mixture of palm oil and sandstone powder to cover her body. Through the streets, she will offer people an embrace, leaving the mark of this mixture on them, to make visible the presence of Congo in the DNA of the city of Liverpool.

Pathway Ngamba also explores the connections between Liverpool and Boma, ports that have had parallel importance in the industrial and colonial histories of both the Congo and the UK. Boma, where Hadassa is based in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a port city that was crucial in the development of the transatlantic slave trade with Central Africa, and later in the extractive trade of natural resources from Congo. 

This event coincides with the opening of the Liverpool Biennial 2025, in which a work by Hadassa entitled CERVEAU 2 (2019) maps the traces of natural materials extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo from colonial times until today.