ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Mixing fiction and reality, Congolese photographer Gosette Lubondo is interested in the memory of places and revisits her country's historical sites through stories. She began in 2016, with the series Imaginary Trip I, where this "imaginary journey" took the artist to abandoned spaces left to nature. She reoccupies them by embodying fictitious, timeless, sometimes ghostly characters in enigmatic and silent settings.

The scenes of Imaginary Tip II take place in the old school of the village of Gombe Matadi, in the Central Kongo region. Founded in 1936, in the days of the Belgian Congo, by Brother Adrien of the Congregation of the Brothers of Christian Schools, the school fell into disuse in the 1970s, following the rural exodus caused by the policies of President Joseph Désiré Mobutu. Each scene, freely inspired by the testimonies of former students, revives the history of these vestiges of the colonial era and transposes them into a phantom world. In creating the characters and costumes, Gosette Lubondo embodies a contemporary "Alice in Wonderland", alongside other models: Elikia, "hope" in Lindala.