Gosette Lubondo questions the relationship to History, collective memory, inscription and erasure.
This book presents her works produced between 2013 and 2019.

Her first documentary series, Au fil du temps, in 2013, when she was a student at the Beaux-Arts, examines the dilapidated transport infrastructure. The work of time, memory, traces of the past: the major recurring themes that occupy her are already present. Her participation in the Bamako Meetings in 2015 widens its visual horizon.

Appealed by abandoned buildings imprinted with the marks of time, Gosette Lubondo took over a disused train in Kinshasa railway station, in which she depicted imaginary passengers, whose expressions and clothing evoked the past life of the station. The series, called Imaginary Trip, was a resounding success and launched her career.

Two years later, Gosette continued this “imaginary trip” in a former school, founded in 1936 by a congregation of Christian brothers, and now abandoned. This would be Imaginary Trip II, a series produced as part of her photography residency at the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (Paris). The museum purchased the series and exhibited it in 2020 as part of the group exhibition “A toi appartient le regard et (…) la liaison infinie entre les choses”.

Tala Ngai means in Lingala "Look at me" or "Visit me". Inspired by the classic portrait, Gosette Lubondo photographs young women in Kinshasa in two stages: before and after they are made up and dressed, in other words as they are at home and as they appear in public. A third photo shows part of their interior. This series is both a reflection on self-perception and the external gaze, and a testimony to the lives of women from Kinshasa in 2020.

Published on the first solo exhibition of Gosette Lubondo in Kinshasa, 2020 at the Espace culturel Texaf-Bilembo and the galerie Angalia, curated by Chantal Tombu