Jean-Vincent Simonet: Kitengela

Photographer Jean-Vincent Simonet (b. 1991, Bourgoin-Jallieu, France) 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.