Years of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have left their mark on the country’s landscapes. While much of what war leaves behind is destruction — the pockmarks of bullets on buildings, homes decaying after their residents have fled — war also creates new landscapes. This photography exhibition investigates the inscriptions left by combatants during the First and Second Congo Wars at Gbadolite Airport in northwestern Congo. These inscriptions speak to the experiences of soldiers andmilitiamen during these conflicts, not only providing insight into their lives but also visually representing the wars themselves.
Gbadolite, President Mobutu’s remote ancestral town, was once known as his Versailles, where he constructed luxury lodgings and entertained visitors. But between 1995 and 1999, at the same airport where Mobutu once landed his supersonic Concorde jet, young men arrived as members of state armies and rebel groups in successive waves of military occupation. They left charcoal inscriptions on the airport’s walls: names, religious texts, drawings, military boasts, and even quotations from postcolonial philosophy. These visual traces of the past attest to successive (and sometimes opposing) combatants’ preoccupations, desires, and need to memorialize their presence as they entered combat zones from which they often had little hope of returning home.
The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, signed in July 1999, aimed to put an end to the Second Congo War. The peacebuilding efforts of the last twenty years are built on this agreement, but the legacies of conflict continue to resonate in Congolese landscapes and lives. Photographed between 2015 and 2017, the images in this exhibition illustrate the conflicts that have passed through and transformed the country. These etchings, proverbs, and personal testimonies reveal the individuality of the combatants; together, the layers of graffiti show the human elements—and human toll—of war.
The exhibition consists of 20 photographs. The graffiti appears in French, Lingala, English, Sango, Arabic, and Swahili, with translations provided in the accompanying interpretive text. The photographs tell a story of violent conflict over time and as experienced by members of different armed groups and nationalities—Congolese, Ugandan, Central African, Rwandan, Chadian—as they passed through Gbadolite. The very personal inscriptions both speak to individual experience and testify to war, power, subversion, and memory.
