Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City

by Marie-Françoise Plissart

"Both the camera and the pen, in a way, ultimately are colonial tools," writes Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck in the preface to this collaborative book with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart. They sought to overcome the inherent bias of their instruments and produce a work that provided a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality of Kinshasa, but also of a second, invisible city, one composed of the immaterial architecture and infrastructure, the place's imaginative life. Both scholarly and accessible, the resulting work, born out of De Boeck's long engagement with the "urbanscapes" of Central Africa and Plissart's empathic eye, was shaped in dialogue with Kinshasa's own inhabitants and the ways they write, read, talk, dance and live in their city. The exhibition, out of which the book came won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004.

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!