Akaa 2020, my choices by Thierry Maindrault
The year 2020 will have been very gloomy for African designers. While they were to be in the spotlight in a multitude of European exhibitions and fairs, the pandemic broke their hope of showing their work this year. Akaa, the quality and benchmark fair, very specialised in Contemporary African Art, had to throw in the towel like the others despite its many attempts to adapt.
To open a micro series that will be dedicated to creative photographers attached to the African continent, I opted for Gosette Lubondo.
My first encounter with the works of Gosette Lubondo took place in Arles. In the dead end street Abbé Grégoire, just in front the headquarters of the Rencontres, in the jumble of an ephemeral gallery, a few works by Gosette Lubondo, suspended on a side wall, shone completely in the middle of the ambient mediocrity. The following years, among the stands of Akaa presenting photographs, I was always interested in the evolutions of this Congolese creator, granddaughter and daughter of photographers. Nothing destined this brilliant teenager to become a creative photographer in the family line, except the vocation resulting from an unexpected combination of circumstances.
To this day, despite her great youth, this woman has all the innate qualities to become a great creator, especially inside the photographic field. She understood that creation is certainly not limited to a “click clack … and on to the next idea”. Creation is an approach, it is living intensely with one subject (including photographic model) until there is fusion, it is a red thread for continuity, it is the respect of the dream along its realisation, it is Gosette Lubondo .
Her is two first creative series “Imaginery Trip” and “Imaginery Trip II” are well designed with the same framework declined in two parallels, they were pleasant and catchy like for a first “musical hit” with a double in redundancy.
The latest collection, “Tala Ngai”, is a serial of triptychs whose creativity is based on a true knowledge of the work’s environmental coherence. The portraits are fixed, consciously or unconsciously, at the precise time of communion with the soul of the photographer. These life exchanges are offered to readers. Each triptych is a novel or at least a short story that shows us the potential evolution of the creative range of this author.
Akaa Digital Conference Program 2020
November 20 to November 29, 2020
www.akaafair.com/rencontres-2020
Gallery Angalia
25 rue Ernest Renan
92190 MEUDON
sur rendez vous
