Prisca is the name my mother gave me.
Munkeni is my father’s name.
Lafurie is the name I chose.

The country that saw me born is not mine; the State that saw me grow up has vanished; the nation on my passport barely exists. What remains is my culture, its memory weakened by history’s upheavals, its survival resting on nothing more than a handful of people, an oral tradition whose breath is fading.
Is this, perhaps, the soil my art grows from?

This urge to make frozen moments speak to one another, to stretch their existence into infinity, to force them to talk within a setting saturated with elements, with light. Over time, the objects, places, or people through which our identity is shaped fade away, turning into memories with diaphanous shapes.
The weight of their meaning, the frustrations or the pride they gave rise to, slowly bury themselves in our everyday lives, at the gates of forgetting.
And memory, hemmed in by that daily life, loses the thread: why we cry, why we love, why we live…?

My photographs seek to prolong these moments, to capture in a single scene the story these storytellers tell, to retouch their worlds so as to give them back their full otherness. A fight against time, against space, and all their elements. One last homage before the flood of years.

An ordinary path, a furrow already traced, a marked-out route. Zairean, born in Brussels in 1981, raised in Kinshasa. I veered off… to Johannesburg, where my art came into bloom. Then Paris, the explosion.