Response Question Student’s Name Professor’s Name Institution Name Course Date Response Question The film by Renzo Martens presents the audience with a disturbing vision of how poverty cult ...

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The film by Renzo Martens presents the audience with a disturbing vision of how poverty culture works - how Poverty is performed, packaged, and disconnected from its socio-political and historical context. Martens' film unmasks the discrepancy between people's reactions on the international level when confronted with images of the suffering in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the structure that maintains the inegalitarian rule of the suffering at the same level (Goldsmiths Art, 2019). This is not only a criticism of the altruistic attitude of the West that consumes the suffering of an African but also an overthrow of how Poverty is perpetuated as a marketable product instead of being combated as an abnormality arising from years of colonialism. By placing this argument into colonialism's historical and economic perspective, Martens's film reveals how the structures creating Poverty are masked by the stories supposedly designed to compel compassion. This is further developed through TJ Demos and Walter Rodney's work, which informs Martens' condemnation of exploitative global iconography.
To capture this dichotomy, Martens's film shows how images of Poverty - of starving children, refugees, and depopulated villages - are used to generate compassionate responses; lochs do not bring about meaningful change. Demos also refers to the discussion of what Allan Sekula calls the 'pornography of the 'direct' representation of misery,' where people feel concerned about it and yet do not have to engage with the realities of that Poverty in any way. According to Demos, this forms what he refers to as a 'haunting,' shifting concern away from the structural cause of Poverty by facilitating the mere consumption of suffering as an object (Demos, 2013). To capture this aspect, Martens's film juxtaposes reality through the farce of inciting the impoverished community to 'enjoy' Poverty to analogy to the notion that if images of the impoverished are profitable for the West, why shouldn't the impoverished locals also benefit from it? Casting a critical gaze on how Western photographers and journalists take advantage of African suffering, Martens's film dismantles the complacency that seeks to keep the West oblivious of the causes of Poverty and its profiting from its