Sometimes, nonsense recounts the world. “The River that Swallows All the Rivers” explores the remnants of dictator Mobutu Seseseko’s 32 years of reign. This series revisits Mobutu’s mammoth projects built across Congo – often for personal purposes.

These decaying structures express the exuberance of the 1970s and 1980s in Zaire, then a country dreaming of grandeur. Courted by the great powers amid the euphoria that followed independence the country seemed a laboratory full of possibilities. What is left today reminds us of the power’s vacuity, even if absolute. And the vanity of autocrats in believing themselves to be eternal.