Framer Framed

Podcast: Reclaiming Relationalities – From Shinkolobwe to Hiroshima

In this episode of the Framer Framed podcast, 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 region of the DRC to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Around 70-75% of the uranium used in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasakiwas where sourced from Katanga’s Shinkolobwe mine. This history remains largely unknown, even within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s thinking on relationality, Léopold Lambert and Gloria Pavita 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 (2026) 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: Irradiated Imaginations and Anti-Nuclear Solidarities traces the intertwined histories of nuclear infrastructures, colonialism and resistance, beginning in the Northern Kazakh steppe around Semey, which the Soviet Union used for their nuclear programme between 1948 and 1991, causing long-lasting effects of pollution and radiation of water, land, humans and non-human animals. The exhibition Between Fires is curated by Fabienne Rachmadiev and presented in partnership with Sonic Acts at Framer Framed from 13 February t/m 17 May 2026.

Listen here


Or select your favourite podcast platform:
Spotify,
Apple,
Castbox,
Overcast,
Pocket Casts,
RadioPublic,
RSS.

Links

• The Funambulist - Colonial extractivism and epistemic geologies in the Congo

Attachments

• Exhibition Hand-Out - Between Fires NL
• Exhibition Hand-Out - Between Fires EN

Exhibitions

13 Feb – 17 May 2026

Exhibition: Between Fires – Irradiated Imaginations & Anti-Nuclear Solidarities

Curated by Fabienne Rachmadiev, the exhibition traces the intertwined histories of nuclear infrastructures, colonialism and resistance, presented in collaboration with Sonic Acts

Agenda