Search results for ""Author Wilfried N'sondé""

Today, waste management – especially plastic – on a global scale is more worrying than ever. The Democratic Republic of Congo stands among countries most affected by the lack of accountability of manufacturers relocating and outsourcing huge landfills on its soil. Ranked as the 8th poorest population in the world despite their country’s immense mineral wealth, the Congolese people is overrun by garbage left by goods produced with their own resources and labor but yet designed for others. A folk-art movement was born from the junkyards of Kinshasa. Dressed in masks and costumes made from rubbish, a generation of street children and artists from Kinshasa's Academy of Fine Arts have come together to create “Ndaku ya la vie est belle”. Founded in 2015 by visual artist Eddy Ekete, this art collective brings together 25 creators who draw their inspiration from ancestral clothing arts to stand against the ecological disaster their country suffers. To amplify their struggle and celebrate their craft, Stéphan Gladieu creates a series of totemic portraits merging documentary photography with artistic practice. In a live studio set up on the streets of Kinshasa, he highlights the militant artists’ surrealist silhouettes and vibrant creations. Introduced by novelist Wilfried N'sondé, these portraits tell a story of creative talent passed on despite the attacks of consumerism.

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Behind the bars on her window, Rosa Maria dreams of sunshine, love, calm, and leaving the city where she lives with her family. She suffers her father's beatings, hides her femininity behind shapeless clothing, and pines for the beautiful Jason as she awaits her opportunity to flee. Meanwhile, her older brother is found dead in a nearby parking lot, and the neighborhood explodes in a riot against the police. Rosa Maria resolves to act before she is devoured by family intrigues and despair. Wilfried N'Sondé's powerful voice creates a palpable sense of the absence of hope and the social and racial isolation that pervade the Paris projects, even as he never abandons the expansive capacity of individuals to dream of better lives beyond a seemingly hopeless reality.

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In Borders, Jean-Michel André questions the notion of border, a question which takes the form of a wandering, whose starting point is in the Jungle of Calais on the eve of the evacuation of the slum in 2016. André pursued the project over three years in France, Italy, Spain and Tunisia - anywhere there were refugees in search of shelter, anywhere there were men, women and children brought together by the same hope of crossing one final stretch of water. With these images of the Jungle, he mixes various fragments of landscapes to form a visual palimpsest. These silent places never cease to signify partition, rupture and desolation and exhale the vertigo of emptiness. Desires from elsewhere become dust and smoke in these spaces where the human figure, photographed isolated and from behind, is located on a threshold, between reality and imagination, memory and present. With accompanying texts by writer Wilfried N’Sondé, whose novels follow similar themes, together André and N’Sondé combine their disciplines the creation being Borders which is neither a linear series nor narrative – rather a collection of works.

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A nameless young man lives in the housing projects outside of Paris. When he was a child, his parents moved with him from the Congo to France, hoping in vain to escape poverty and violence. His best friend, Drissa, is in a psychiatric hospital and now Mireille, his girlfriend, the woman with whom he has shared his childhood and hopes, has left him to reconnect with her Jewish roots in Israel. During a night out to drown the pain of his heartache, there is a fight with a policeman, the policeman dies, and the young man is arrested and taken to jail. Between police beatings and abrupt interrogations, his memory becomes his sole ally to escape from the exiguous space in which he is confined. Half-conscious and delirious, he reflects on his journey from the land of his ancestors to his life in the projects with Drissa and Mireille. In The Heart of the Leopard Children, N'Sondé explores the themes of love and pain, belonging and uprooting, desire and fear—all with an implacable and irresistible accuracy. Wilfried N'Sondé's first novel awakens the reader with an urban symphony of desire and lost love, attuned to the violence that accompanies the struggle for social ascension and a sense of belonging, and the paralyzing sentiment of betrayal that inhabits a young man caught between traditions and cultures. Awarded the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Senghor for the originality of his work, the author captures the sounds, rhythms and pleas of a young man who pulls on the alarm from his prison cell to warn against the multiple barriers of confinement that risk the future of certain sectors of French youth today.

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What are the limits of empathy and forgiveness? How can someone with a shameful past find a new path that allows for both healing and reckoning? When Clovis and Christelle find themselves face-to-face on a train heading to the outskirts of Paris, their unexpected encounter propels them on a cathartic journey toward understanding the other, mediated by their respective histories of violence. Clovis, a young undocumented African, struggles with the pain and shame of his brutal childhood, abusive exploits as a child soldier, and road to exile. Christelle, a young French nurse, has her own dark experiences but translates her suffering into an unusual capacity for empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Christelle opens her home and heart to Clovis and presses him to tell his story. But how will she react to that story? Will the telling start Clovis on a path to redemption or alienate him further from French society? Wilfried N'Sondé's brave novel confronts French attitudes toward immigrants, pushes moral imagination to its limits, and constructs a world where the past must be confronted in order to map the future.

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