Kinshasa : tales of the invisible city

"Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City offers an original analysis of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. The authors, 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 autochthonous mind and imagination in the form of a mirroring reality lurking underneath the surface of the visible world. The book explores the constant transactions that take place between these two levels in Kinshasa’s urban scape. Based on longstanding field research it provides insight in local social and cultural imaginaries, and thus in 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.