Rebel Takeover
This selection of photographs is part of an ongoing visual journey through the Democratic Republic of Congo, a land of extraordinary natural wealth and devastating contradictions. As a young Congolese photographer, I grew up surrounded by both beauty and violence. My camera became a way to ask questions, quiet the noise, and bear witness to what often goes unseen.
This first part of the project focuses on the fall of the city of Goma a few months ago (2025). After a week of fighting, rebels backed by Rwanda have seized almost complete control of Goma, a city of two million in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, and the city morgue is overwhelmed with the dead. Goma’s residents are starting to emerge from their hiding places, desperately searching for water and food. Meanwhile, the Congolese military, which was supposed to protect them, has been defeated.
Scorched earth
At the heart of this work is a tension between humanity and the environment — how people live with, rely on, and sometimes destroy the landscapes that sustain them. These images trace the fragile threads between natural resources, exploitation, displacement, and survival. From remote mining towns to disappearing forests, from rivers turned toxic to communities resisting in silence, each frame tells a story of a land both wounded and alive.
The DRC has some of the world’s richest natural resources and biodiversity. This is the country’s luck and curse, it is etched into the faces of young miners, into the scars on the earth, and into the social fabric of places where conflict and extraction have become intertwined.
What interests me is not spectacle but slow violence—the kind that unfolds over time, out of sight—the way a tree disappears, the way a river dries up, the way a village shifts because the ground underneath has been sold. These are environmental stories, but also human ones.
Our forests
In twenty years, the DRC has seen the disappearance of more than 5 million hectares of forest cover and a still unknown number of species in one of the planet's last reserves of plant and animal biodiversity. According to forecasts by Greenpeace, it could lose up to 40% of its forests by 2050.
As the fourth forest country in the world and second for primary humid forests behind Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo now has 155 million hectares of tropical forest, i.e., two-thirds of its area and more than half of the immense Congo Basin forest, which covers six African countries.
The people living near the parks and in the forests, caught between the twin grip of precariousness and insecurity, survive as best they can in an environment ravaged by greed but also by need. Until when will the riches of the Congo be a curse for its inhabitants?
