Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip curated by Erica P. Jones and Elaine Eriksen Sullivan

Abstract

Located in a gallery next to the central foyer, Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip immediately greeted guests from the main entrance of the Fowler, encouraging them to follow the artist on her travels. The location's institutional framing facilitated close looking for each photograph, while maintaining a steady pace of narrative. The vibrant photographs stood directly across from the soft lighting of the foyer's courtyard, supplying ample natural light for viewers to view the works, accented by soft overhead lighting. The exhibit was separated into two series, Imaginary Trip I and Imaginary Trip II, creating a seamless chronological transition that moved viewers in a clockwise pattern among its four walls, tying them into a cohesive narrative. Imaginary Trip I moved viewers through an urbanized abandoned structure, followed by rural scenes of dilapidated buildings in Imaginary Trip II.Lubondo set the series in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wall text described how the artist focuses on dilapidated, decaying structures that reflected the afterlife of Belgian occupation. Train cars and abandoned schools were the most frequent settings for the series, given their importance to colonial economic maintenance and prosperity. Within a contemporary context, this stark departure from their former use indicated that the structures have been transformed into visual symbols of abandonment, embodying a sense of despair and longing for yesteryear. It is here that Lubondo directly challenged this assumption of total desertion, inserting several people into the composition moving among the ruins. People in these photographs directly interacted with their surroundings; some with intention, others seemingly nonchalant to the physical space around them.Imaginary Trip I was set in an abandoned train car in which a large, unkempt open space is flanked by a rusted metal carriage. It was here where viewers were introduced to Elikia, a woman primarily seen in a red dress, facing away from the camera. In the first photograph, the woman looked up at a chalkboard entitled Situation de Production des Vehicules du 14/09/2015. Directly below, a number of stops were listed with their arrival times. However, instead of standard city names for the stops, they were supplemented with seemingly nondescript words: “Voyage,” “Imaginaire,” “Na Keyi,” “Confort [sic]+ Securité,” “Somba Tick,” and “Assurance.” This labelling emphasized the imaginary element of the series, asking viewers to embark with Elikia to the abstracted stops that complete the trip.Imaginary Trip I continued with the woman entering an abandoned train car, facing away from the viewer and walking toward the back of the composition. In subsequent images, Elikia was replaced by other Congolese urbanites. Both men and women entered the run-down train car, sitting down on wooden chairs, facing the open windows of the rusting carriage on either side. Activities varied: sleeping, playing a game of chess, reading, and engaging in conversation with the others present. The works not only embraced each person's relationship to their physical surrounding, but also emphasized the artist's manipulation of the composition. Each photograph detailed one person interacting with fellow passengers, shown in a ghostlike translucency, resulting in a fading presence. This stood in stark contrast to the other figures in the picture, who were shown in a completely photorealistic manner. Lubondo emphasized a sense of the liminal in translucency, indicating the transient nature of each person's respective presence. In wall text, the artist connected this depiction of fleeting time to the liminal spaces between a formal colonial presence and an independent DR Congo.In Imaginary Trip II, Elikia returned, taking viewers on a narrative journey among the ruins of an abandoned secondary school established by a Catholic fraternal order. The setting was lush with overgrown flora, a metaphor highlighting how the natural surroundings have overtaken the symbol of a formal colonial presence. Lubondo reclaimed the landscape from despair by reinserting Elikia and younger pupils dressed in blue-and-white school uniforms. Unlike those in Imaginary Trip I, the young people accompanying the protagonist directly interacted with their physical surroundings, using the ruins as a makeshift “jungle gym”—another deft metaphor on the artist's part, given the rural surrounding of the site. Elikia continued to face away from the viewer, with the exception of one photograph in which she served bread to two pupils sitting at a makeshift dining table. Otherwise, the woman's attention primarily focused on the pupils’ activities, jovial play mixed with manual labor: students read books, arranged furniture, and held makeshift classes. Elikia's overall presence was fluid between photographs, as Lubondo inserted her into a few scenes where she acted as an authoritative figure for the pupils, yet did not include her in other compositions. Similar to the previous images, some of the pupils are shown as translucent figures, solidifying Lubondo's stylistic choices across the series.While Elikia's biographical details were absent from both series, Lubondo used supplemental documentation to identify the fictional pupils in Imaginary Trip II. On a side table, curators placed photocopies of the students’ primary school certificates. This work, Trophées Oubliées, showed a series of seven different certificates, in all of which large portions of the paper are torn or missing. Papers were left with significant sections of print and handwriting omitted, making it difficult to parse out the exact meaning of the text. What was clear were the handwritten dates in which the certificates were signed, ranging from 1975 to 1982, prominent years of the Republic of Zaire, adorned by their official emblems. Alongside the significant degradation, each certificate was accompanied by a photograph of the pupil—with their back to the camera, completely obscuring their face. This differed from Imaginary Trip II, in which pupils were shown with distinct facial features, emphasizing their individual identities. This positioning created a haunting depersonalization of each student, rendering them anonymous in tandem with their ruined certificates.The architecture of Imaginary Trip allowed for a sense of narrative connectivity, allowing viewers to move at their own pace. The positioning and placement of the photographs on the gallery walls allowed viewers to dissect the scenes individually, then connect each image to the others, generating an understanding of the artist's narrative. The consistency in the dimensions of the photographs strengthened its overall cohesiveness, emphasizing the importance of each scene to the series. While guests were encouraged to view the photographs in the order that they appear on the wall, as encouraged by the artist and executed by the curators, the series could have been viewed at any starting point in the foyer, allowing visitors to understand the narrative aspects of the work from any vantage point.Exhibition curators Erica P. Jones and Elaine Eriksen Sullivan asked students at Kinshasa Académie des Beaux-Arts to write a series of personal reflections and responses to select works in the series. These reflections were added as supplemental wall text to a number of photographs, and by extension expressed their interpretations of Congolese history and culture. Excerpts detailed how students of the Académie interpreted Lubondo's compositions, relating their experiences as contemporary Congolese people in a modern global context. This was a brilliant curatorial decision, as it added additional context to the narrative of the series and served as a key entry point for audiences who were not familiar with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Engaging for experts and laypeople alike, Imaginary Trip built on an ever-strengthening African photographic lexicon, long well known from exhibitions such as In/Sight: African Photographers 1940-The Present (Guggenheim, 1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center for Photography, 2006), as well as the Bamako Encounters biennale, founded in 1994. Imaginary Trip showcased the intersection between personal and collective narratives often present in contemporary African photography, detailing the complex relationship between the self and the whole as subject and object. Lubondo's photographs call on this rich tradition, expanding the subject matter into a contemporary DR Congo. For those new to the field, Imaginary Trip served as a fantastic introduction to contemporary African photography, as the curators provided ample historical context. The wall texts and supplementary materials encouraged all audiences to compose their own interpretations of Imaginary Trip, connecting their own understandings of the transformation of physical space and its effects on societal development.