A Film Screening of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Presentation on G.A.S. Foundation
Join us at G.A.S. Lagos on 29th August, 2025 for Open House, a film screening of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and presentation that offers a closer look at G.A.S. Foundation. Led by the G.A.S. team, guests will have the opportunity to learn more about the Foundation’s mission and residency opportunities before embarking on a guided tour of the building. The tour will include visits to the G.A.S. Library and the Picton Archive, as well as the spaces where artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners live and work.
The evening will conclude with a screening of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a 2024 documentary written and directed by Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker and curator Johan Grimonprez. Revisiting the Cold War episode surrounding the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the film traces how musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashed the UN Security Council in protest. The documentary also features excerpts from My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin (narrated by Marie Daulne aka Zap Mama), Congo Inc. by In Koli Jean Bofane, To Katanga and Back by Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), and audio memoirs by Nikita Khrushchev.
Event Details
Date: 29th August, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location: 9b, Hakeem Dickson Drive, off T.F. Kuboye Road, Oniru, Lagos
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Programme Details
4:00pm - Opening Reception & Welcome Drinks
4:30pm - Opening Remarks by G.A.S. Director Moni Aisida
4:45pm - Residency Reflections with G.A.S. Alumna Nengi Nelson
4:55pm - Reflections on the Imọ̀ra Arts Intensive with Noah Okwudini
5:05pm - Audience Q&A
5:20pm - Guided Tour of G.A.S. Lagos Space by Adekunle Adeboye and Tomiwa Adegbola
5:50pm - Film Screening: Soundtrack to a Coup d’État by Johan Grimonprez
8:00pm - Closing & Networking
Andrée Blouin, featured in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat ©Terence Spencer/Popperfoto.
About the Film
One February morning in 1961, singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach crash the UN Security Council to protest the murder of prime minister Patrice Lumumba of the newly independent Congo. Sixty yelling protesters throw punches, slam their stilettos and provoke a skirmish with unprepared guards as diplomats look on in shock. Decolonization spins the world upside down, infusing it with a sense of hope. Six months earlier, sixteen newly independent African countries are admitted to the United Nations, triggering a political earthquake that shifts the majority vote away from the old colonial powers. The Cold War peaks as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly, in reaction to the neo-colonial power grab unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Denouncing America’s color bar and the UN complicity in the overthrow of Lumumba, he demands immediate decolonization worldwide.
To retain control over the riches of what used to be Belgian Congo, King Baudouin of Belgium finds an ally in the Eisenhower administration, which fears losing access to one of the world’s biggest supplies of Uranium, a mineral vital for the creation of atomic bombs. Congo takes center stage to both the Cold War and the scheme for control of the UN. The US State Department swings into action: Jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong is dispatched to win the hearts and minds of Africa. Unwittingly, Armstrong becomes a smokescreen to divert attention from Africa’s first post-colonial coup, leading to the assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected leader. Malcolm X stands up in open support of Lumumba and his efforts to create a United States of Africa while also reframing the freedom struggle of African Americans as one not for civil rights but for human rights, aiming to bring his case before the UN.
As Black jazz ambassadors are performing unaware amidst covert CIA operatives, the likes of Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston face a painful dilemma: how to represent a country where segregation is still the law of the land. Jazz and decolonization are entwined in this forgotten episode of the Cold War, where the greatest musicians stepped onto the political stage, and downtrodden politicians lent their voices as inadvertent lead singers. This story of the undermining of African self-determination is told from the perspective of Central African Republic women’s rights activist and politician Andrée Blouin, Irish diplomat and enfant terrible Conor Cruise O’Brien, Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, and Nikita Khrushchev himself.
About the Writer and Director
Johan Grimonprez
Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given to become a time-traveler of the imagination? Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of theory and practice, between art and cinema, going beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain to weave new pathways in how we perceive our realities.
Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our collective imagination, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities. Our histories and memories are not only a means to reimagine our contested past, but also tools to negotiate our shared presents. In Wonderland, the Queen rephrases it to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Grimonprez’s feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by the Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), Double Take (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and Shadow World (2016, in combination with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein) premiered at the Tribeca Festival and went on to win the Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Traveling the festival circuit from the Berlinale, Sundance to Tribeca, Grimonprez’s films have garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. They have been acquired by PBS, NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4. Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London.
Grimonprez is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York) and The Kamel Mennour Galerie (Paris) and he’s published by Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart.
