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RUINART: GOSETTE LUBONDO, MANU SOLERTI

In 2021, the Maison Ruinart Prize was awarded to Congolese photographer Gosette Lubondo. Given by Maison Ruinart in partnership with the Picto Foundation, this prize celebrates an emerging photographer selected from the “Curiosa” section of Paris.

 

Gosette Lubondo’s work was a reflection on memory, heritage, and time. The pieces produced during her residency were born from her encounter with the different places involved in the champagne making process. She was struck by the traces of history and time: the imprint of repeated pickaxe blows on the walls of the chalk crayères and the survival of ancestral winemaking know-how. Although the methods have been modernised, the process has remained fundamentally unchanged for three centuries; a process that relies on human hands and expert, ancestral gestures. True to her artistic style, Gosette involved herself in these rituals, a way of representing her own encounter with a universe previously unknown to her.

 

The exhibition was presented in the Ruinart Lounge on Fort Island.

 

Find out more about Maison Ruinart.

About the Artist

Born in 1993 in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she still lives and works, Gosette Lubondo explores the memory of places that were once emblematic and have now fallen into disuse. She stages timeless characters to provoke reflection on time, heritage, and memory.

 

Born into a family of photographers, Gosette truly discovered photography at the age of 14. She entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa when she was 18 and graduated in 2014. She made a name for herself two years later with her first series entitled “Imaginary Trip”, shot in a disused train in Kinshasa station.

 

In 2018, Gosette extended this «imaginary trip» to an all-but abandoned former school in Central Congo. This would become Imaginary Trip II, a series produced as part of the photographic residencies at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris— acquired by the museum and exhibited in 2020 in the collective exhibition entitled, “Who is gazing”?