This exhibition's unusual concept and presentation, the combination of Filip De Boeck's texts and Françoise Plissart's photographs, won it a Golden Lion at the last Architecture Biennale in Venice. The Kinshasa, The Imaginary City project invites us to look beyond architecture and to spurn narcissistic architectural criticism.As the capital of the former Belgian Congo, Kinshasa occupies an important place in the history of Belgian architecture and town planning. In the post-colonial city, however, a different kind of modernity has emerged. The urban infrastructure is determined by shortage and by absence. For this reason, the emphasis in the exhibition is not so much on the material infrastructure or the heritage of colonial town planning as on the city as a mental space: the Kinshasa behind the visible reality, both geographical and physical. In a complex field of survival strategies, against a religious backdrop, in a city that, because of a lack of means, is inventing an architecture that starts from zero, it is scarcely possible to look at urban organisation from an architectural point of view.