Georges Senga’s Décalquer narrates a story of neocolonial mining extractivism and the human vicissitudes it has generated in Katanga, the rich mineral province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Between 1968 and 1982, the Japanese workers from the Nippon Mining Company in Japan were contracted by Zaire’s (actual Congo DRC) government and moved to live and work in the Lamba region of Katanga, at the SOMIDICO mining company.
In 1983, the Japanese workers left abruptly when Congolese president Mobutu interrupted the contract with the NMC. After more than a decade in Congo, workers left their children behind: these kids are the protagonists of Georges Senga astonishingly beautiful photographs.
In drawing from the aesthetics of the classic African studio portrait (reminiscent of the Bamako and Dakar photographers Malik Sidibé or Seydou Keita), the artist gives shape to ten years of field-research, makes visible a forgotten community of Congolese citizens and the complexities of Modern global identities, by uncovering the very existence of this Japanese-Lamba community.