Night Moves I

Night Moves I, published in the Pan-African journal Transition chaired by Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, is a 35-page intervention curated for SPARCK by Dominique Malaquais and designer & photographer Cédrick Nzolo. Photographs, graphic works and essays by eight creators explore the nature of life lived without electricity in Central Africa’s largest city: Kinshasa. Equal parts rant, autobiography, political commentary and historical narrative, Night Moves I is part of a larger multimedia project initiated by SPARCK, dedicated to one overarching theme: the urban night. Night Moves I is the project’s first publication. 

Artists and writers featured in Night Moves I are: 

• Dicoco Boketshu – Photography & Word
• Eléonore Hellio – Word
• Kakudji – Collage
• Gabrielle Le Roux – Photography
• Norman Mailer – Word
• Dominique Malaquais – Word
• Méga Mingiedi – Experimental cartography
• Mowoso – Photography & Word
• Cédrick Nzolo – Photography, Word, Graphic design
• Daku Rani – Comix
• Yves Sambu – Word

The Night Moves project grew out of discussions around a series of images created by Cédrick Nzolo titled “Divas de la honte” (“Shame’s Divas”), about the quest for light on the streets of nighttime Kinshasa. One of these photographs appears on the cover of Transition 102 (pictured above); others are reproduced inside the journal. For selections from the original series, see below. (In Transition, the photos appear in black and white; in the original series they appear in colour).

Many thanks to the Mowoso crew, without whom Night Moves I could not have happened, and to the Norman Mailer Estate.