Chrystel Mukeba
I've Never Seen My Father Cry
PHOTO OXFORD OPEN CALL 2025: RUNNER UP
Chapter One: Homecoming.
For as long as I can remember, my father has never spoken to me about the Congo.
When he was sent to Belgium alone to study, he was only seven years old.
A childhood brutally torn away. At seventeen, he returned briefly, but the echo of this passage has left deep wounds.46 years without seeing his family again.
The shock is immediate. Memories arise, darker, more complex. How to face one's demons? How to reconcile the past with the present? Every step he takes is a struggle, a confrontation between the deceiving vestiges he fled and the reality of a Congo that has changed, that is no longer the same.
Each moment is a key, opening a door to the past. But behind these doors, there is also the emptiness left by uprooting, the weight of a fragmented identity.
Congo, this country that has always seemed distant and abstract to me, nevertheless contains part of my history. As a child, I would ask questions, but the answers were often fragmentary, sometimes silent, as if revisiting these memories hurt too much. This first chapter is an attempt to recompose my father's story, to put words and images to what has been shattered.
It's the beginning of a journey in which photographs become bridges between memory and reality, between the child he was and the man he is. A quest for meaning, a need to reconnect with my origins. Through places, images and stories, I try to rediscover that lost memory, the one that forged my father, and which, in a way, forges me too.
This trip to the Congo is only the first step in this quest for memory and identity.
Although deeply meaningful, this experience is only a prelude to a larger goal: to return to my father's hometown, Mbuji-Mayi.
It is there, at the heart of his earliest memories, that I will truly be able to capture the essence of his story and, by extension, my own.
This photographic project will continue to unfold, in search of answers, meaning and reconciliation with the deep roots that shape us all.
My work explores intimacy, memory and personal relationships through photography. I'm particularly interested in how family history, uprootedness and trauma shape identities and links between generations.
For me, photography is a way of revealing what is often invisible: silences, absences, the traces left by time and history. My vision is deeply influenced by my own heritage and by the stories I hear from those closest to me.
Based in Brussels (BE), Chrystel Mukeba studies photography at ARBA ESA.
Her photographic work, mainly in film and portraits, focuses on intimacy, identity and roots.
The need to freeze people and moments is a recurring theme in her work.
Through portraits and images of everyday life, she attempts to freeze the ephemerality of a moment, capturing the fragility and preciousness of an instant, of a detail.
A publication on this theme, entitled LES INSTANTS, saw the light of day in 2022, published by Arp2 Editions with the support of the Wallonia-Brussels federation.
Regularly exhibiting in Belgium and more recently abroad (Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane 2023...), she takes part in numerous group and solo exhibitions.
Her work was recently included in Kanal Pompidou's new acquisitions - Portraits Style Congo 2021-2022 series.
The year 2024 marks a new turning point in her practice. She receives the Sofam grant as well as a grant from the FOMU, which allows her to begin the first chapter of her latest long-term project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I've Never Seen My Father Cry. In 2025, she is awarded a new grant from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles to begin Chapter 2. This project was exhibited at FOMU in Antwerp from February to May 2025. A selection of images, along with a video, are now part of FOMU’s permanent collection.
The project I've Never Seen My Father Cry was selected by the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva for the 2025
Instagram: Chrystel Mukeba
