The spacecraft lifts from Kinshasa. Its destination is Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. For the astronaut Elie, the journey promises a place where life might be planted anew. Yet in Rashiyah Elanga's film Another dream under the Troposphere, departure does not deliver a clean beginning. Other astronauts follow her and ask her to return to Earth, where the community she has left still needs a future. On Europa, an unreturned love deepens her sense of estrangement. Space opens the story, but it cannot settle the question of where a person belongs.
Elanga, a filmmaker and installation artist born in France to parents from Congo, gives this journey the visible seams of something made by hand. The spacecraft and its surrounding world emerge from green-screen filming, digital collage, internet images, objects moved in front of the camera and performers dressed for a science fiction that remembers European colonial dress. The hands that animate some objects remain in view. A future made this way cannot pretend to have arrived by itself. Someone must assemble it, decide who enters it and recognise what has been carried from Earth.
That combination of an outward voyage and an unfinished relationship to home makes Elanga's work a particularly searching form of Afrofuturism. The 2023 film borrows the scale of a planetary adventure while declining a familiar promise of escape. It moves from Kinshasa to a moon whose name echoes Europe and back toward questions of Congolese history, inherited identity and communal responsibility. An earlier film, shown in Geneva in 2021, imagined waterlily people driven from their pond and arriving at a dazzling garden. In both, a strange landscape is never empty. Its beauty belongs to a story about who may remain there.
A launch with a place name
Another dream under the Troposphere begins from La Place du 30 Juin in Kinshasa. The square's name recalls 30 June 1960, the date of Congolese independence. Elanga's protagonist does not depart from a generic spaceport. Her point of origin carries political memory into the supposedly universal story of exploration. The location also matters personally: Frankfurter Kunstverein's account of the commission says Elanga's parents come from Congo and that the artist had not visited the country. The film imagines a place connected to family before it imagines a new one beyond Earth.
An off-screen woman's voice introduces Elie's flight. She reaches Europa and tries to plant life there. Two other astronauts arrive to argue that the hope of beginning elsewhere does not solve the conditions facing their community at home. Their interruption changes the film's dramatic centre. The question is no longer simply whether Europa can sustain a human settlement. It is whether a new territory can be called a future if the people left behind are absent from the plan.
Elanga places this dilemma beside a love story. Elie falls for Pando, an inhabitant of the moon, and the feeling is not returned. The rejection leaves her speechless and alienated before she finds a way to recover a sense of herself. Romance here is more than a diversion from the political plot. Elie's attachment to a resident of Europa tests the fantasy that arrival grants belonging. She has travelled farther than anyone at home, but distance cannot compel another being's affection or consent.
The name Europa pulls several histories into one word. It is the actual moon around Jupiter, considered by scientists a possible place to investigate life beneath ice. It also recalls the name Europe, the continent whose colonial powers shaped Congo's history. The film does not make these meanings identical. Their proximity gives Elie's mission an uncomfortable charge: a Congolese astronaut approaches a place named for a figure in Greek myth with plans to cultivate it, while a listener may hear an echo of Europe. A journey associated with scientific hope begins to resemble the older language of claiming and settling a new world.
The other astronauts therefore offer more than a warning about homesickness. They make the film's utopia answerable to a community. Elie can explore, but she cannot treat escape as the entire solution. In many space adventures, the launch is the moral triumph, the moment when a protagonist breaks free of Earth's limits. Elanga gives the launch a more complicated meaning. It is an act of imagination, courage and distance, followed by the harder question of how that imagination returns to the people who helped make it possible.
A future with visible hands
The film's images resist the smooth finish associated with expensive space cinema. Elanga shot performers against a green background, then assembled studio footage and found images during post-production. Hand-made objects move in front of the screen. According to the Kunstverein, the artist sometimes leaves the animating hands visible rather than removing them digitally. These decisions create a world whose construction is part of its appearance.
That openness has a political effect as well as a visual one. A flawless digital planet might invite the viewer to consume it as a completed destination. Elanga's objects ask the viewer to notice the act of making. The universe on screen has been cut, held, moved and joined. It has the provisional energy of a model that can still be altered. If Elie's problem is the temptation to imagine a perfect elsewhere, the film's materials offer a different prospect: a future made from available fragments, with its makers and its joins still visible.
The Kunstverein compares the low-tech animation with early cinema. That comparison is useful for the pleasure of the images, though Elanga's handmade objects do something specific to this story. They let a contemporary artist make a space voyage without surrendering the image to the polished authority of a major studio or aerospace institution. Even the cosmic journey can be staged with bodies, fabric, painted objects and compositing. Its strangeness comes from choices, not from a claim that only a large machine can picture the future.
Costume gives those choices another historical layer. White skirts, gowns, corsets and ruffs recall the dress of European scholars and explorers from centuries associated with colonial expansion. Wigs and glittering science-fiction makeup bring the figures toward pop spectacle. The combination refuses a clean separation between old empire and new technology. Elie's voyage wears traces of the people who once classified distant lands and their inhabitants. The clothes do not say that exploration must repeat conquest. They make that possibility visible enough to be questioned.
Music by Kamal Jahi, cinematography shared by Elanga and Jing Lin, and performances by Elie Autins, Lalla Nomoko and Elanga help build the film's world. Elanga wrote, directed and edited it, but the image is also a collaboration among people who gave bodies, sound and camera work to the mission. The credits matter because this is a film about the relation between an individual dream and a community. Its making has a social structure of its own.
The technology shown and the technology used are not the same. Elie travels by spacecraft inside the fiction. Elanga creates the fiction through studio work, image collage and visible manipulation. The gap between those two levels is productive. It lets a viewer hold the wonder of a distant moon and the modest physical means of bringing it near. Afrofuturism appears as an act of composition undertaken in the present, with the tools that can be gathered now.
Europa, Congo and the limits of arrival
The Kunstverein describes the film as drawing on fantasy, magical realism, science fiction and Congolese Bantu cosmology. These sources give Elanga more than a selection of styles. They allow the voyage to cross different ideas about what a world is and how a person can inhabit it. The film's astronaut tests a moon as a possible home. The figure she meets there has a life that precedes her arrival. Her fellow travellers insist that the home left behind is still active in the story. No single frame can contain all these claims.
Elanga also connects the fiction to the Congolese Keka Aerospace initiative. The company pursued a privately financed rocket programme, an ambitious effort that sits far from the usual map of national space agencies. In the film, that reference matters because the idea of African space flight is neither a borrowed costume nor a fantasy without earthly counterparts. People in Congo have imagined and attempted aerospace projects. Elanga transforms that fact into fiction without presenting Elie's journey as a record of any actual mission.
The distinction between the real initiative and the invented voyage gives the film room to play. A rocket programme can be discussed in terms of engineering, funding and risk. An artwork can ask what the desire to launch means to a person whose image of Congo is mediated by family, distance and a European upbringing. Kinshasa is an imagined starting point with a documented family connection, and Europa is a destination whose promise grows uncertain once Elie gets there. The journey can hold that personal and political distance without turning the astronaut into a simple stand-in for the artist.
The film's title keeps the dream at the centre. A dream can free an idea from ordinary limits, but it can also reveal a fear or desire that daytime language has hidden. Elie's wish to plant life on Europa suggests care, not only conquest. Her companions' appeal to return suggests care too. The tension is between forms of care aimed in different directions. A new world may allow growth; a neglected community needs transformation where it already lives. Elanga does not flatten either impulse into a slogan.
Pando's rejection sharpens the issue of reciprocity. If Elie approaches Europa as a place ready to receive her, another being's independent wishes disturb the script. The imagined moon is not a blank page. The love story shifts from possession to an encounter with refusal. Elie's eventual self-recovery can be read as a move away from requiring the new world to confirm her identity. She must find a way to be herself even when the encounter does not answer her longing.
This is a more demanding space story than a simple reversal of historical conquest. A reversal can leave the original logic of possession untouched, changing only who holds power. Elanga's narrative places a Congolese traveller in a position usually reserved for European or American explorers, then lets the journey expose the weakness in a dream built on departure alone. The future worth imagining must include an account of those who remain, those who were already there and those who decline the traveller's desire.
The waterlily people
Two years before the Frankfurt commission, Elanga showed a short film in the Geneva exhibition Pray 4 Homes. The gallery text describes a pond-dwelling people called the hommes nénuphars, or waterlily men. Expelled from their home, they move through a distorted city before reaching the gates of a Swarovski Garden. Goldfish swim in a watery sky. The displaced figures, all played by Elanga, dance and smile as they arrive.
The garden's glitter does not erase the eviction that began their journey. Its name suggests luxury, display and an almost artificial refinement. The waterlily people, by contrast, come from a pond, a habitat in which their bodies and their surroundings belong together. Moving them into a city and then into a garden changes what home can mean. A refuge may offer safety while still keeping its newcomers in a scene designed by someone else.
Elanga plays all the figures. Repetition gives one body several presences, a community made through costume, performance and editing. The choice can be read as playful and economical, but it also makes displacement feel collective without requiring a documentary crowd. The same face returns in multiple forms. Each figure carries a variation on the same threatened condition while remaining part of a strange, exuberant world.
The gallery grouped the film with works by Sean-Kierre Lyons and Amaka Madumere. Its text described the exhibition as revising Afrofuturist aesthetics through an Afropessimist lens and refusing a harmless utopia. That curatorial frame helps explain why the garden's delight and the eviction should be seen together. Elanga's goldfish and dancing figures do not need to conceal harm in order to picture pleasure. Their world can be gaudy, funny and unstable at the same time.
The two films share a structure of travel into an alluring elsewhere. The waterlily people seek refuge after expulsion; Elie seeks a possibility beyond Earth. Neither destination provides an uncomplicated answer. Geneva's garden has a gate, a sign that entry is controlled. Europa has a resident who may refuse intimacy and companions who call the traveller back. These details give the imagined places social rules. They are worlds, not merely attractive backgrounds.
The first film also suggests how Elanga's later space adventure grew from an existing interest in image-making that mixes theatrical play with political unease. Goldfish in the sky prepare the eye for a moon where organisms and histories may recombine. A distorted city anticipates the Frankfurt film's refusal of a purely realistic location. Yet the motifs do not simply repeat. The pond story begins with forced removal; the astronaut's mission begins with chosen departure. Putting them beside each other reveals the difference between flight from danger and travel toward possibility, even when both journeys encounter limits on belonging.
The image after the landing
Elanga studied in Lyon and at Frankfurt's Städelschule and has shown work in several European cities. Those routes help explain the art's facility with moving among languages and sites, but the films do not ask to be reduced to a map of the artist's movements. Their invented places have their own textures. Kinshasa is a launch point; Europa is an icy promise; a pond is a lost home; the Swarovski Garden is a refuge with a gate. Each place changes the terms under which a body can appear.
The cinematic fabric changes with them. In Another dream under the Troposphere, the green screen allows images from far apart to touch. Digital and analogue elements share the frame. Costumes carry centuries of European visual history into an imagined interplanetary mission. In the waterlily film, one performer multiplies into a people while fish and sky exchange their usual positions. Neither piece depends on photorealistic illusion. Their improbable details make the pressure on their characters newly visible.
The Frankfurt film's handmade effects give its final question particular force. Elie cannot find the future merely by arriving at the right coordinate. The people who made her journey, the people who remain on Earth and the being she meets on Europa all complicate her hope. In the visible hands that move objects before the camera, another proposition comes into view: a world is made by participation, and its maker must stay answerable to others. Elanga lets the spacecraft fly. Then they ask what kind of home it could help build when the traveller returns.