An infrastructure of light and darkness: in visual conversation with Baudouin Mouanda

This article owes its inspiration to a series of photos that poetically documents the street lighting conditions in Brazzaville and which was taken by the Congolese photographer Baudouin Mouanda (born 1981). The first section reviews the provision of electricity and street lighting systems in sub-Saharan Africa as an expression of state power and weakness through infrastructural visibility and invisibility. Its aim is to provide a qualitative background and to enhance the situational understanding of the second, site-related section of the article which focuses on Brazzaville, the capital city of the Republic of Congo. Here Mouanda’s visual series is interpreted in light of conceptions of the ‘shadow’ and the ‘non-complete’, usable in trying to grasp the urban formations and lived realities in the global South.