#24 - Reclaiming Relationalities: From Shinkolobwe to Hiroshima

In this episode, Léopold Lambert, editor-in-chief of The Funambulist magazine, is in conversation with Gloria Pavita, a reader, writer, storyteller, and spatial practitioner working between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Africa. Their conversation centres on the violent infrastructures of relationality connecting the Katanga regionof the DRC to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Around 70-75% of the uranium used in the bombs was sourced from Katanga’s Shinkolobwe mine, but this history remains largely unknown,even within the DRC.

Drawing on Édouard Glissant's thinking on relationality,they explore how colonial extraction – from uranium to rubber to coltan – forges connections across geographies and communities that might be reclaimed as networks of solidarity. The conversation moves from historical erasure and opacity to the present: the minerals extracted from that same land now travel in the form of minerals inside our phones and laptops, raising questions about witnessing and complicity.

This podcast is a co-production between Framer Framed and The Funambulist magazine bringing together two parallel projects: the Framer Framed exhibition Between Fires: Irradiated Imaginations and Anti-Nuclear Solidarities and The Funambulist's issue ‘The Colonized and the Atomic Bomb: 80 Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Indigenous Perspectives on Interconnectedness’.

The exhibition Between Fires is curated byFabienne Rachmadiev and presented in partnership with Sonic Acts at Framer Framed from 13 February t/m 17 May 2026.