Mwana na Mayi (Child of the Water)

Child of the Water is a personal documentary project exploring my grandfather’s village of Bounda, where life revolves around the Alima River. It reflects memory, identity, and the beauty of a community shaped by water.

Child of the Water explores the intimate relationship between the Alima River and the village of Bounda in Congo-Brazzaville. This project reflects on how water shapes memory, identity, and community, weaving together personal history and collective experience.

“I am a child of the water. My grandfather fled the French colonizers by the river, my family’s story changed by it, and today Bounda continues to live in rhythm with it.”

Child of the Water is a body of work I began in 2025, after returning with my father to our ancestral village of Bounda. Home to fewer than 500 people, nestled between the river and the jungle, Bounda is a community whose life is inseparable from the water: the Alima is the path of travel, the source of food, the gathering place, and the witness of memory. It was by the river that my grandfather escaped conscription to work on the “railroad of blood,” and it is by the river that his descendants now return to reconnect with family ties nearly lost to time.

As a photographer of Congolese and Haitian heritage raised in Switzerland, and now based in Montreal, I carry the layered complexity of diaspora. My background in anthropology and my own family’s migration stories have long shaped my curiosity about belonging, inheritance, and the invisible threads that hold communities together.

All the photographs in Child of the Water are made on film with a Nikon F5 and a Nikon 35ti. Working in analogue allows me to slow down, embrace imperfection, and be fully present with the people I photograph.

The project is about water and history: how the great currents of history shape family destinies, and how water remains the common thread that links us, proud descendants of a small village that continues to live in the rhythm of the river. Bounda remains a place of peace and resilience, even as it faces change, like fewer animals in the nearby jungle, fewer fish in the river, and the arrival of cruise boats bringing tourists into the forest without ever informing or including the villagers. Child of the Water is both a tribute to what endures and a witness to what shifts, carried by the flow of the river.