Urban living constantly attempts to ‘suture’ the city, finding ways to stitch gains and losses, or pasts and futures together in the moment of the ‘urban now’. De Boeck’s reflection on the complexities of the postcolonial urban world in the Central African locale is shaped around the visual archive that he built up over the past years with photographer Sammy Baloji. This article addresses the possibilities of such a combination of ethnography and photography to de-centre and reframe urban theory and build an alternative urban archive to explore in novel ways what this ‘suturing’, this living and living together, might mean in Central Africa’s urban worlds today.
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