Master dissertation by Thomas Lanneau

“Seeing comes before words,” as John Berger reminded us as early as 1972. Refusing to submit to this privilege of vision as a dominant sensory approach to the world, this dissertation finds its way - à tâtons - around the photographic archive of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The ambivalent photographic collection of this ‘colonial archive’ is at the center of this book's interrogations on the ways in which ‘the look’ - particularly in ‘the West,’ - shapes the production of knowledge.

Focusing on building sites in Belgian Congo, this book engages critically with the entanglement of colonial and construction history through the lens of photography. Convinced of the necessity of adopting “mobile positionings” in assessing these ambivalent realities, these photographs are explored from several angles of incidence, à tâtons, adopting different 'ways of looking.' Through a series of essays, this book formulates a discursive reading of the patterns of perception that rendered the (slow) violence captured - and often concealed - in these pictures possible.