David Shongo is a Congolese composer and visual artist, whose work explores the interactions between sound and image, focusing on the movements and the poetic impact they can generate together. His works analyze how his personal and collective memory of his country is constructed and also question the notion of absence not as a void but as a political choice of silence. His personal history is marked by the absence of his father, who did not acknowledge him at birth. He grew up in Boma with his mother and sister, where he began playing percussion during family prayers. He pursued university studies in computer science in Lubumbashi, where he also taught himself jazz piano and accompanied renowned local musicians on tour.

In 2018, he met filmmaker Petna Ndaliko, who encouraged him to start a solo career and introduced him to cinema and photography. That same year, he received a scholarship to study photography through a collaboration between the University of Nottingham and Yolé!Africa. David then began integrating music and visuals into his creations. He developed a new piano technique inspired by the linguistic characteristics of several Congolese peoples, influenced by Ray Lema's Rhythmic Wheel concept.

He made his first film in 2019, which was simultaneously exhibited at the Lubumbashi Biennale and the Rietberg Museum. His second film was selected for the Locarno Film Festival in 2020, the same year he also received a three-year research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2021, he created the Kinshasa Pianos Festival, the first event of its kind dedicated to the piano in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Between 2020 and 2023, David Shongo presented various exhibitions and performances worldwide. In 2022, he participated in a group exhibition at the House of World Cultures HKV in Berlin, where French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard also participated six months before his death. His latest film, Lumene, was selected for the Dok Leipzig festival. In 2023, his work gained increased international recognition with his participation in the Venice Music Biennale and Ars Electronica in Austria.

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Filip Van Dingenen is a multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of the Ecole Mondiale in Brussels. In his process-oriented approach he uses a wide range of methods and outputs, which merge participatory strategies and social and environmental relevance, within the themes of recreation, heritage and education. His oeuvre stands alongside the specific object-oriented making of art. He is a researcher who tries to fathom the course of events in the complex world through a roundabout way. In fact, he can be seen as an anthropologist-artist who tries to map the world a little more insightfully through story and research. Filip Van Dingenen starts from socially striking fait-divers and extrapolates those items into broader thoughts, whereby all information sought and “experienced” also becomes an inherent and visible part of the project.

Filip van Dingenen was a researcher at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent/Brussels and an affiliated researcher at the Laboratory of Education and Society at KU Leuven. He was also a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy (2013), associate artist in residence with Mark Dion at ACA (2008), and developed projects in Artist Residency Programs at Irish Museum of Modern Art (2008), Wiels Art Center (2009) Banff Arts Center (2013), Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (2015) and worked in Ireland, Argentina, and Equatorial Guinea. He has written numerous articles for journals and magazines and has authored several artist books. His works and performances were presented at 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (2018), Biennale de Casablanca (2018), LIAF, Norway (2017), Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren (2013), Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro (2009), Centro Cultural Español en Bata (2008), Santa Monica Art Center, Barcelona (2006), 7hours Haus19 - Humboldt University & Museum for Natural History Berlin (2005).