Serge Diakota Mabilama, AKA Diamans

Serge was a bright student, and headed towards a scientific career which would have made his parens proud, when his art teacher at the Cardinal Etsou High School, in Kinshasa, persuaded him to opt for an artistic path instead. In 2010, Serge graduated from the Institut des Beaux Arts of Kinshasa with a major in Sculpture. While on a scholarship at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ESAD) of Strasbourg, France, he had an epiphany after reading a book mentioning Marcel Duchamp and his approach. As a child, Serge could give to an object a different use than the one it was created for. So it is no surprise that the idea of extracting an object from its daily context to give it another purpose and place it in an exhibit space appealed to him.

While on a scholarship at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ESAD) in Strasbourg, France, he had an epiphany after reading a book mentioning Marcel Duchamp and his approach - maybe add one phrse about the approach for us uneducated folks who don't know much about Marcel Duchamp. As a child, Serge gave to objects a different use than the one they had been created for, so it is no surprise that the idea of extracting an object from its daily context to give it another purpose and place it in an exhibit space appealed to him. 

Maybe some transition sentence - this led him on a new artistic journey. After graduating, he started his career at the visual art ..

Serge started his artistic career within the visual art structure Kin ArtStudio, with founder, visual artist and curator Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo as his mentor. He has since participated in various artist residencies and workshops that have strengthened his approach and practice. In 2015, he was the recipient of a scholarship at AKDT - the Royale Académie Internationale d'Été de Wallonie - in Libramont, Belgium. He has developed and presented projects in several countries - Belgium (with the European  Union), Tanzania (Nafasi Art Space), Germany (Grassi Museum in Leipzig), the United States (Art Omi), Switzerland, and Morocco (the Montresso Foundation).

Serge questions and uses together different a range of techniques and forms of expression to create his own. Painting, engraving, photography, and sculpture are combined in his compositions, often made with repurposed every day objects. These embody for him a story, a life, society as a whole. His work is a reflection on the political, social and cultural realities of his country and abroad. He questions a human mobility which is constantly in search of its identity. Through his work he aims at proposing a new universal identity based on complementarity - because "differences can complement each others"- and advocates for a positive change.  [these last two sentences could us a tiny bit more detail - proposing a new universal identity based on complementarity... I understand waht you mean but it's not entirely clear what a universal identity is to me?]

Serge works with a range of techniques and forms of expression to create his own. Painting, engraving, photography, and sculpture are combined in his compositions often made with repurposed every day objects. These embody for him a story, a life, society as a whole. His work is a reflection on the political, social and cultural realities of his country and abroad. He questions a human mobility which is constantly in search of its identity. Through his work he aims at proposing a new universal identity based on complementarity - because "differences can complement each others"- and advocates for a positive change.