Open Theme nominee

For many years my childhood memories of Lwiro have haunted me. It was the village of my maternal grandparents and I spent some of the best moments of my life there. Lwiro is a village in South Kivu, DRC. It is also the village that houses the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles (CRSN) built in 1947 at the initiative of the Belgian colonists. This center, like my childhood memories, seems frozen in the past, a happy and peaceful past, without wars or worries.
So, to help me better understand these places that haunt my memories, I chose to call upon two workers from the center, who have been working at the CRSN since the colonial era. With them, I wanted to discover the golden age of this center that my grandfather knew. Their charisma and their love for these places gave me the curiosity to delve into their life experiences in this center where they spent most of their lives with their families. Today, these two workers pass unnoticed in this center. However, they are among the rare witnesses of the history of these places.

Esther N'sapu is a Congolese journalist, photographer and videographer (DRC). She has been collaborating for almost 5 years now with media, humanitarian organizations and companies who want to document their activities on the field (Unicef, Usaid, IOM, EDC, ICRC, Swiss Cooperation, Christian Aid, Google, etc.). She is a member of African Photo Journalism Data base (APJD) and part of the Everyday Africa platform. In 2019 she had her first photo exhibition in Bukavu, DRC on the theme "in the footsteps of hope". In 2020 she is the only Congolese among the 10 Darryl Chappel Fellows for Afro-descendant artists. In early 2021 she participated in an investigation with two other Congolese journalists "From Rubaya to Gisenyi: a mining smuggling in North Kivu". Also in 2021, she participated in a collective project "Hidden Flows - photographers uncover the invisible flows in African cities" along with five other African photographers choosing as their theme "Lake Kivu, a link between the countryside and the city". In 2022, Google commissioned her to make a photo report in the Garamba Park (DRC) and the surrounding villages. Also in 2022, she is a correspondent for Onu Info in the Democratic Republic of Congo where she produces photo