‘Ciel de Saison’: Living Through the Floods of Brazzaville

Born in Ouésso, Congo in 1981 and based in Brazzaville, photographer Baudouin Mouanda has long used his camera to tell stories of resilience and change. His series Ciel de saison (Seasonal Sky, 2020) grew out of the floods that swept through Brazzaville during the COVID-19 lockdown, when neighbourhoods were left at the mercy of rising waters and shifting ground. During the floods, it was impossible to get into inundated streets. Mouanda instead gathered personal testimonies to reconstruct the desolation later. Residents brought their belongings and posed in a flooded basement to recreate the situations they faced. The result is a body of work that reminds us of how fragile our relationship with the environment is and how urgently it demands care. Shown in exhibitions across the world, from London and Seattle to Breda, Mouanda’s photographs have now earned him a place on the shortlist for the Prix Pictet. Below, the photographer reflects on this powerful body of work.

Here, no one sleeps — erosion frightens us. When it’s hot, we don’t know what the next day will bring. The seasons have shifted, and the threat of rain is constant whenever the wind stirs the trees. Leaves and dust fall onto rooftops, calling the residents to vigilance. At night, when thunder shakes the sky, no one dares lock themselves inside; instead, everyone goes outside to watch the heavens…

We see the clouds moving, the stars fading, and we feel the rains drawing near. Each person tries to guess the scale of the coming downpour. Whether heavy or light, it is never welcome in certain neighbourhoods of Brazzaville. Children and adults alike take up shovels to clear the sand invading their homes. With buckets or cooking pots, they try to channel torrents of water, even though it is nearly impossible to hold back the flood’s force.

For the elderly who have spent their lives working, preparing for retirement, and building their houses, their efforts now seem in vain. They salvage what remains — iron bars, planks, sheets of metal — even though they no longer know where to go. They abandon their homes, engulfed by water and sand. They point their fingers at the sky, at the seasons. It is “God alone knows.” Sadly, one cannot resist the forces of nature — they too have their whims.

This project was born out of the extreme weather Africa has endured in recent years, caused by climate change. These photographs remind us all of the urgent need to protect and respect the environment, lest we suffer the consequences of climate change.

To pursue this, I spent hours observing the ClassPro Culture Photography Center I am building, with a basement to serve the residents of Brazzaville’s outlying districts, in the Republic of Congo. Seeing the space flooded by rainwater led me to reflect on a photographic project whose first beneficiaries would be those forgotten neighbourhoods struck by natural disasters. I sought to create a bond with residents around the environmental issues tied to natural phenomena we face — storms and floods — but also to highlight the broader stakes of climate change beyond destruction.

Photography, as the art of appearance, drew me to forge connections with communities, to raise awareness of living better together, using the image as a foundation for meetings and conversations in search of shared solutions. Thus was born the Le Ciel de saison project — with its settings that stir the imagination of reality, with colours that awaken awareness of social issues, with messages taken from real life, visually translated by residents themselves as they become actors of their own environment, using photography as a source of collective revelation for change.




Baudouin Mouanda’s words have been translated from French to English for Something Curated.

Feature image: Baudouin Mouanda, Chez la marchande de légumes (At the Vegetable Seller’s), 2020