The faces of victims of sexual violence appear in Bangui. In the capital, the Maison de la Mémoire, a cultural center dedicated to the country’s recent history, hosts the famous Central African comic book author Didier Kassaï.
In the shade of a tree on a small plastic chair, Didier Kassaï looks concentrated. He cracks one last face: Aïshas, the victim of the anti-balaka milieu. “It’s a portrait I just made with a pencil,” he explains. There are no colors, so suddenly, to bring out these effects, it would be necessary to either play on the light or on the dark. It is to express the pain that society cannot see. ”
The thick line emphasizes a serious look that fixes the visitor. Impossible not to recognize Euphrasie Yandok when she takes a selfie in front of the work: “This is my portrait and it touched me a lot today. If I smile, it’s not for me, but I smile for the family. And you saw, I cried a little and that’s the feeling. That’s the feeling … I see that we are not forgotten, we are not abandoned to ourselves. “
Entitled “From the Shadow to the Light”, it is an initiative of the International Criminal Court (ICC) that supports the victims of the recent conflicts. Mike Cole, the department’s representative in Bangui, explains what drove this project to take place: “They are invisible … When you have a paper without a face, it is impossible to see the person, it does not touch the heart. Now with the face, with the words, we can understand reality and that is the reason for the exhibition. ”
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