Scaling up: Photographing the 'Panorama of Congo'
Tomas Vandecasteele
In this paper we want to share our experience and learning curve regarding the digitization of the Panorama of Congo. This is a large (115 meters x 14 meters, 1610m2) painting (oil on canvas) made by two Belgian painters for the International Exhibition in Ghent (1913). It was created to propagate the Belgian involvement in Congo. Today, it is part of the collection of the War Heritage Institute in Belgium. In its lifetime it was only exhibited twice. Since its last exhibition at the Brussels’ World Fair of 1935, the painting has been in storage. Due to its scale, its material condition and the need for a large custom-built building to display it, chances the canvas itself will be exhibited in the foreseeable future are extrtemely small. This situation called for a ‘digital rescue operation’. With very few best practices for working on this scale available, the team devised a working method to unroll and photograph the canvas. Among other things, the working method included 15+ volunteers and two tanks from the Belgian Army. After months of preparation, the painting was photographed in a military warehouse by a team of photographers from the research team in December 2022. This was followed by an intensive period of stitching the 800+ images together. Next to the technical challenges of this process, we want to highlight some ethical implications of digitizing  colonial heritage. 
The photography of the Panorama of Congo is the first work package of the FILM EU Research Innovation Transformation research pilot 'CONGO VR' (Horizon 2020). The project, which looks at the affordances of virtual reality for decolonizing heritage, is a collaboration between LUCA School of Arts (Brussels), Lusofona University (Lisbon) and the Institute for Art Design + Technology (Dublin). https://congopanorama.filmeu.eu/
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve