Photographer Jean-Vincent Simonet introduces a new photobook that captures the transforming world of Kitengela Glass, an artistic community in the south of Nairobi, Kenya.
Founded in the early 1980s by German artist Nani Croze, Kitengela is a five-acre village crafted from recycled glass, embodying Croze's vision of a creative utopia where art and nature intertwine.
Through his photographs, Simonet captures the vibrant yet fragmented narrative of this place, revealing its intimate origins, its artistic ambitions, and the sociocultural landscape it reflects, drawing an equivalence between the stained glass walls and the surface of the page.
Simonet portrays Croze's house in its social uses as simultaneously a workplace, a childhood home, and a life-size bestiary where animals mingle with their sculpture-garden alter egos in stone. This book works as a visual inquiry into the fate of privatized utopias. It also resonates as an exercise against oblivion, but one that is stripped of any nostalgia, where memories are vivid, pulsating.
Faced with the flood, the abundance but also the disembodiment of images in the 21st century, Jean-Vincent Simonet (born 1991 in Bourgoin-Jallieu, France) aspires to revive their aura and their physicality. With their hallucinatory colours, liquid shapes and shifting contours, the artist's photographs are distinctly painterly: urbanity dissolves into phantasmagorical skies illuminated by the city's lights, petals become liquid stains dripping onto each other, naked bodies resemble cyborgs or dolls with their supernatural shine and hues, while industrial machines are reduced to abstraction, a jumble of blurred and contrasting components.
