Georges SENGA
About him
Georges Senga develops his photographic work around the history and stories that are revealed, illuminating our actions and present. Three of her projects and explore memory, the search for resonances than men, their actions and leave objects, resilience thereof. A dialectic is installed and invites the viewer to think beyond the image, to capture a narration. In these series this imaginary is closely linked to the reality of his country.
The open windows are found in the "Footprints" series with subjects of stranded waste, traces of a careless act on a beach. Qualified by Simon Njami of uncivil act, one can see signs of modernity tinged with a consumer who has difficulty finding the bonds of cohesion and collective duty. Georges Senga are detected by the angle of view to a relay inventive forms. Thus was born a transformation, a recycled beauty in the heart "of a brothel left there."
In "my new ceilings" abandoned houses landscapes adjacent new construction in Lubumbashi. We pass doors and windows closed or missing colonial ruins in reinforced concrete structures of a contemporary urban architecture ... Here, like an army that points to the sky its spearhead, a roof appears: bare, training. There, a house and sloping tiled roof, built on a road in the fields, is overrun by tall grass. And covers the nature and yards discover Lubumbashi being built.
The project "Life after death" Kayembe Kilobo accompanies the teacher who, through his opinions and appearance perpetuates the memory of former Prime Minister Patrice Emery Lumumba. Presented as a diptych, each pair of photographs reflects a parallelism between the national reference already exceeded by 3 "political time" and the one who crossed them. Appearing humble and invested with a certain size, that can teach this man the story or interview that this link between past and present? Given the singular opinion and written history, parallel stories are created, which are transmitted individually, locally, friends, students, neighbors, family.
A look at the career of this doppelganger can it bring on the art scene, outside political tension, the issue of political amnesia? What would be left to say about this obsolete or active memory of a former Prime virulent quickly erased from the political map ...?
The story is through official archives and individual memories. It is seen in a photo greeting Lumumba in the official car, and right next door, is its double cycling. The young ex Premier is surrounded by his ministers and advisers, the old professor is today surrounded by his pupils wisely aligned and dressed in the uniform of schoolchildren. This tensioning power between youth and old age shines radiation the fragility of what is transmitted. What deaf oscillates between the promise and the erasure of the trace and inheritance.
All this could bring the question of the foundation and the future: by placing these situations in the area of the exposed image, Georges Senga emphasizes what is in the order of what we tell, and that one was.
The effectiveness of framing, far from being functional, gives way to melancholy and poetic. This photographer, at every stage of its process, sharing notes and highlights a dialectic that openness becomes a story that leaves everyone with the task of documenting and telling from there.
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