17.10 ’26
Booklaunch Atlas Subjective de Lubumbashi
🕐 Friday 16 October 2026
📍Atelier Picha, Lubumbashi (DRC)
🔗 instagram.com/picha_art_center/
🙏🏻 Atelier Picha (Gaelle Van Lede, Grady Bizaki, Semi Kansense, George Senga)
We are delighted to announce the official launch of the Subjective Atlas of Lubumbashi, taking place at Atelier Picha on Friday 17 October, during the Lubumbashi Biennale. Nearly a hundred inhabitants of the city have mapped their lived experiences — fear and affection, displacement and belonging, night-time rhythms and street economies. Join us to meet the makers, hear the stories, and be the first to gain a copy of this unique publication. We look forward to celebrating the atlas's release in Lubumbashi — experience the city through the eyes of those who live it.
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Picha & Subjective Editions, 2026
French-English, 192 full-colour pages, 16.5 x 22 cm
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Lubumbashi is not a city to be easily navigated; it is a city to be lived, loved, hated, remembered and constantly transformed. This Subjective Atlas of Lubumbashi looks beyond the colonial grid, railway lines and mining infrastructure of Congo’s second-largest city. On the initiative of independent art and research centre Picha, nearly a hundred inhabitants have mapped their lived experiences. Their drawings, photo series and alternative cartographies acknowledge both the city’s wounds and its cultural vitality, tracing fear and affection, displacement and belonging, neighbourhood economies, night-time rhythms, rituals, and personal landmarks. We see flowers bloom despite hardship, braids become living archives, and clothing shape urban aesthetics. These poetic gestures resist being pinned down to coordinates, but unveil a constellation of interconnected worlds where memory, labour, creativity, pain and resilience meet, allowing us to imagine potential futures from this point forward.
—
ISBN 978-9-46-444804-7
This publication is a result of collaboration between Subjective Editions and Atelier Picha
Editor-in-chief: Annelys de Vet
Editorial team: Grady Bizaki Fungafunga, Filip De Boeck, Semi Kansense, Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi, Gaëlle Van Lede
Picha & Subjective Editions, 2026
French-English, 192 full-colour pages, 16.5 x 22 cm
—
Lubumbashi is not a city to be easily navigated; it is a city to be lived, loved, hated, remembered and constantly transformed. This Subjective Atlas of Lubumbashi looks beyond the colonial grid, railway lines and mining infrastructure of Congo’s second-largest city. On the initiative of independent art and research centre Picha, nearly a hundred inhabitants have mapped their lived experiences. Their drawings, photo series and alternative cartographies acknowledge both the city’s wounds and its cultural vitality, tracing fear and affection, displacement and belonging, neighbourhood economies, night-time rhythms, rituals, and personal landmarks. We see flowers bloom despite hardship, braids become living archives, and clothing shape urban aesthetics. These poetic gestures resist being pinned down to coordinates, but unveil a constellation of interconnected worlds where memory, labour, creativity, pain and resilience meet, allowing us to imagine potential futures from this point forward.
—
ISBN 978-9-46-444804-7
This publication is a result of collaboration between Subjective Editions and Atelier Picha
Editor-in-chief: Annelys de Vet
Editorial team: Grady Bizaki Fungafunga, Filip De Boeck, Semi Kansense, Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi, Gaëlle Van Lede
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