The spacecraft is a monument everyone can see. For Icarus 13, Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda recast a monumental structure in Luanda as the vehicle for a fictional mission to the sun. Other city sites acquired new functions in his photographic account of the expedition. A disused building could become an observatory; an event at a stadium could supply the atmosphere of a launch. The mission did not happen. The photographs and model insist that, for the duration of the work, it is worth asking why an Angolan journey into space might seem less credible to a viewer than the familiar space myths of other nations.
Kia Henda’s fiction is made from existing architecture, not a digitally perfected world. That choice gives Icarus 13 its double vision. The eye recognizes a city, perhaps even a structure that has been part of a daily route, while the story names a radically different use for it. The same object can carry an official memory and a speculative one. The artist does not erase the original building to install a future. He uses the gap between what it was made to signify and what a photograph can make it signify.
Made in the late 2000s, Icarus 13 combines a photographic installation with an architectural model. The invented mission to the sun asks the viewer to move between scales: the size of a memorial in an actual city, the reduced dimensions of a model and the impossible distance to a star. Nothing needs to be digitally transformed for the project to travel. Kia Henda changes the role assigned to a structure and lets the camera carry that altered role into a persuasive sequence. The distance between the modest means and the extravagant destination is part of the work’s wit.
Wit should not make it seem slight. In a first-person conversation published by BUALA, Kia Henda said that writing one’s own history and planning one’s own future are vital questions in an African context. He described Afrofuturism as a way to step outside the immediate present, allowing a projected future to interfere with the legacy of the past. That formulation describes Icarus 13 exactly. It is not a prediction that a spacecraft will depart Luanda at night. It is an intervention in who gets to make a public story from the built environment.
A mission made of photographs
The photographs in Icarus 13 work like evidence for an event that never occurred. LABoral lists eight photographs and an architectural model. One account published with Galleria Fonti describes the artist’s transformation of ordinary or incomplete sites into mission components: a Luanda stadium, a former cinema and the memorial to Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto. The project uses the visual credibility of documentary forms while exposing their ability to arrange a fiction. Its joke is not that photographs are false. It is that a photograph can become persuasive evidence when a caption gives it a new system of meaning.
The Neto memorial is especially charged material. It is not a neutral rocket-shaped prop discovered by chance. A monument built in relation to post-independence state memory becomes the imagined vehicle of a future expedition. Kia Henda directs attention to a structure already invested with political aspiration and recasts its upward thrust as technological ambition. The artistic transformation is funny, but it also asks whether independence-era hopes can be revisited without simply restoring the official language that once carried them.
The mission’s target, the sun, completes the provocation. It is not a conveniently plausible destination chosen to make the fiction resemble a scientific report. It is an extreme object, a star that resists the human body and the spacecraft. A journey there belongs to myth as well as science fiction. The title recalls Icarus, the Greek figure whose flight ended when he came too close to the sun. By attaching that myth to an African mission, Kia Henda can play with the history of whose ambitions are called heroic and whose are called absurd.
A scholarly account of the project connects the journey’s nocturnal logic to a story about Mozambican independence leader Samora Machel joking that one could travel to the sun at night. The joke punctures the solemnity of national space races. It lets Kia Henda borrow the grandeur of exploration without accepting the grand certainty with which states often sell it. Even the mission’s schedule turns ambition into comic theatre.
The photographs’ documentary posture also makes the viewer complicit. If we briefly accept the mission, what convinced us? Was it the arrangement of images, the model, the language of an expedition, or the desire to see a future in which Angola occupies that role? If we instantly reject it, why? The work asks us to examine our standard of plausibility. Modern space history has taught many audiences to expect technological agency from a handful of nations. Icarus 13 does not need to build a real rocket to reveal that expectation.
The city as an unfinished sentence
Kia Henda grew up in Angola after independence and during civil war. The M Leuven account of his practice emphasizes how questions of political power, identity and relations between Africa and the West run through his photography, video and installation. It also notes his move from street photography toward interventions in documentary images. That transition does not mean he abandoned observation. The works remain anchored in what a place looks like. He changes the story those appearances are made to tell.
Luanda is a demanding site for such a practice because its architecture registers several projects at once. Colonial construction, socialist-era aspiration, state monuments, private development and newer international investment meet in the same urban field. A photograph can isolate a façade, but Kia Henda’s art keeps asking what sits behind it: who commissioned the structure, what future it promised, what labour built it and who now uses the space around it. His invented mission is one answer among several, a way of making the city’s unresolved meanings visible.
He has described the process of entering fictional territory as a change in his practice. In the BUALA conversation, he talks about intervening in what first appeared to be documentary images and letting them acquire another significance. The phrase describes a precise artistic shift. Rather than present a street as an unmediated fact, he stages the operations through which images become public history. Selection, sequence, caption and scale are not afterthoughts. They are tools that can turn a ruin into evidence of decline, or into the launch site of an impossible voyage.
Icarus 13 therefore resists a tidy opposition between truth and fiction. The buildings are real; the mission is invented. The history of Angola’s monuments is real; the photographs’ new explanation is not. Viewers have to hold both layers at once. That is a more demanding kind of looking than simply spotting a hoax. It reminds us that documentary images of actual places always arrive with frames and stories too. Kia Henda makes those frames conspicuous enough to be examined.
Utopia with cracks in it
The artist’s speculative work is not consistently optimistic. In a conversation with M Leuven, he describes Paradis Metallic, a video installation shot in the Middle East in 2014, as the story of a man who tries to establish a city in the desert. Nature obstructs the attempt, and the result is only a skeletal structure. For Kia Henda, the work concerns humanity’s urge to claim land without respect for its conditions, and the entropy that undoes a supposedly permanent construction.
That account complicates any reading of Icarus 13 as a simple celebration of technological ascent. A city can be imagined, but it can also fail. A monument can be renamed, but it still bears the material limits of its construction and use. Kia Henda’s interest is not in swapping a negative picture of Africa for a frictionless positive one. He is alert to the dangers in dreams of mastery, whether the setting is a capital city or a desert. His humour makes room for ambition while keeping suspicion close.
The desert city in Paradis Metallic is made visible only by persistent, failed effort. In the artist’s account to M Leuven, a man tries repeatedly to impose a settlement on the landscape; what survives is a skeleton, not the complete city he intended. The video’s setting matters because the desert is often pictured as empty ground waiting for a visionary developer. Kia Henda makes the ground an active condition. Nature resists the plan, and the exposed frame of the city records that resistance. The work’s future is neither a triumph of engineering nor a romantic return to untouched land. It is a record of the friction between a human design and a place that will not simply receive it.
Kia Henda linked that work to Luanda’s recent building boom. He described reflective skyscrapers and a desire to remake the city as another Dubai, with investors paying too little attention to what residents needed. Empty buildings, in his account, make a landscape of concrete that echoes the desert of the video. That connection gives Paradis Metallic a sharper target than the abstract folly of “building too much.” The question is whom a building is for. A spectacular skyline may advertise prosperity while failing to provide a home. The video lets an incomplete structure stand for that gap between appearance and use.
The 2017 exhibition A City Called Mirage extended Kia Henda’s attention to speculative urban imagery. Its title is apt beside Paradis Metallic, but the video is where the artist makes the mechanics of the fantasy explicit: the worker, the hostile terrain and the bare frame that remains. The projected city is a promise with a cost, not simply a view from above.
His own answer to an interviewer is instructive. Asked whether his images might transform how Africa is imagined, Kia Henda resisted grand claims for himself. He described a desire to find common factors across places and to shorten distances in dialogue, with Angola as his particular centre. That wish for dialogue begins from a particular city and its histories. In Icarus 13, the Luanda memorial does not lose its public past when it acquires a speculative function. In Paradis Metallic, the city that fails to take hold in the desert recalls buildings in Luanda whose polished exteriors conceal a failure of public purpose. These connections make the work local even as it travels to museums elsewhere.
From one future to many
The Afrofuturist aspect of Kia Henda’s practice has little to do with a standard science fiction look. In Icarus 13, the future is made by retitling and reassembling the present. In Paradis Metallic, the future becomes a warning about the desire to conquer an environment. In his wider photography and video, archival fragments, monuments and urban forms serve as places where conflicting timelines meet. He is interested in who gets to narrate a place’s next stage, and what past must be acknowledged before that narration can be credible.
The position is especially pointed in relation to colonial archives. Photographs of African cities have often been produced for the purposes of administration, extraction, tourism or proof of underdevelopment. Kia Henda takes up the camera without accepting those older uses as its fate. When he manipulates an image, the manipulation is not a failure of truthfulness. It announces that the camera’s authority can be borrowed, contested and redirected. The viewer must then decide whether to question only the invented space mission or also the supposedly factual image systems that taught them what Angola could be.
There is a useful contrast with Krull’s Futuristic Dreams story, which uses fashion and conversation to think about different possible presents for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kia Henda’s work is more satirical and more invested in the authority of architectural and photographic records. Both projects show how an image of an alternative future can expose a historical argument in the present. Their methods and locations remain distinct; the comparison works because it sharpens the question of who controls a visual narrative.
An art institution can show Icarus 13 as a clever deception, and a viewer may leave remembering only the sun-bound rocket. That would miss the labour of reclassification on which the piece depends. A stadium becomes a launch site. A memorial becomes a spacecraft. A photograph becomes evidence for an event that did not happen. Each change tests the power of an image to authorize history. The work’s impossibility is visible, but its underlying problem is real.
Kia Henda’s Afrofuturism does not promise that imagination alone repairs war, inequality or the politics of a city. It offers a more exact freedom: the authority to interrupt a received account of what an Angolan place means. He starts with structures already built and stories already told, then rearranges them so that a future can be asked about rather than assumed. The rocket is in Luanda from the beginning. The voyage occurs when the artist persuades us to see it.