The film’s performances and settings reflect on radical transformation. Here, things have fallen apart: a toppled statue of Stanley appears, alongside the wreck of a metal boat belonging to King Leopold’s company, the AIA, marooned by the tides of history. Bebson stages a ring of fire within the unfinished palace of the dictator Mobutu—also born in this town—who ruled for 32 years. Its hissing and crackling seem to exorcise the past.

Incidents coalesce into movements through time and space—at times gradual, at others overwhelming. Faced with such forces, Bebson’s ritual gestures extend lifelines—sonic, visual, performative—that anchor us in the present, absorb the past, and reach toward a future that suggests another possible space.

He recycles fragments of Mobutu’s speeches, cries out the Earth’s crises, and sings a love song that recalls vanishing soundscapes. Wrapped in magnetic tape, like a figure entangled in a global web, Bebson invokes spiritual forces for protection and resistance, while above—along the geostationary equator—the world’s communication satellites continue their endless orbit.