Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City

by Filip De Boeck, Marie-Françoise Plissart (Photographs)

In their internationally acclaimed book, Kinshasa , anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart provide a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality that Kinshasa presents today but also of a second, invisible city as it exists in the mind and imagination of its inhabitants. They bring to light a mirroring reality lurking underneath the surface of the visible world and explore the constant transactions that take place between these two levels in Kinshasa's urban scape. With the exhibition that accompanied the release of their Kinshasa book, the authors won a Golden Lion at the 11th International Architecture Bienniale in Venice, 2004.This beautifully illustrated publication is now again made available. Based on lengthy field research, it provides insight into the imaginative ways in which local urban subjects continue to make sense of their worlds and invent cultural strategies to cope with the breakdown of urban infrastructure.

Genres: Africa, Anthropology, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a mind-bending read. De Boeck's words juxtaposed with Plissard's photography destabilize any assurances you may carry coming in that you can know or access 'the city' in the singular. Instead, they work to show the city-as-mirror hall, without any center, and best understood as a refracted, fragmentary, constantly (re)generating physical and imaginary space.

I like how De Boeck (following Foucault) describes cities as spaces that "place one in an elsewhere or a nowhere, that are capable of juxtaposing several otherwise incompatible spaces and sites in a single real space... spaces also that are marked by specific systems of opening and closing... spaces that escape from the order of things, its standard forms of classification and accumulation, if only because they constantly conjure up the aesthetic through their appeal to the imagination and the oneiric (p. 254-255)." This 'heterotopia', De Boeck explains, is defined by its capacity for simultaneity (e.g., a vast mirror hall) (p. 256).

I was left with some questions, however. For example, De Boeck's method seems to valorize the phenomenological as a ‘realist’ ethnography. INn an anthropological text, it seems to suggest that by reducing our understanding of the city to the 'pure' data of sensory experience we'll arrive at some higher truth. I'm not so sure. ‘Walking the city’ may sound like a fine idea and may produce lots of interesting data (as the book's collection of vignettes demonstrates), but who do De Boeck and Plissard walk the city with? who can they talk to? In other words, what shapes the 'pure' experiences De Boeck and Plissard seek to represent in 'The Invisible City?' That De Boeck reads the turbulent black waters of the Congo through his shameful memory of 'Heart of Darkness' makes me wonder whether we can ever fully leave the discursive depths of the waters we swim in.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written by Filip de Boeck, a Belgian anthropologist doing research in Kinshasa, a city in Africa where the unfinished architecture is evidence of the state-failure of past political phases, where place is constructed by the people that use it, and where the "invisible" culture is reflected onto "visible" bodies. The incorporation of photographs by Plissart with De Boeck's elegant writing and use of theory to explain his observations and conversations with people in the city makes this book one of my absolute favorites of visual anthropology reads, and cultural anthropology books in general!