Project Inception

Crossing Waters

Accompanied by his mother, who flew back shortly after, he landed in Brussels in the winter of 2016. The kindred separated following a summer-autumn stopover in Cairo, where his parents and siblings had settled in the prestigious district of المهندسين — ‘The Engineers’ in Arabic — before his departure, across the sea, seated on an Egyptian airline, to the executive capital of Europe.

His aims and dreams in Europe — beyond pursuing university education again — included seeking safe haven away from persecution by his motherland’s diplomats and their Chinese counterparts while studying abroad two seasons earlier.

Beijing-Bujumbura Nightmares

Leading up to exile from China and Burundi, his original sin was attributed by Communism-preaching Chinese authorities to a one-week cocktail of arbitrary ingredients in Spring 2016. The confidential cocktail’s ingredients were deposited on a cross-country tabletop, covertly sent over electronic communication rails, and unaccompanied by any legal counsel.

The Fifteen Ingredients

On the torturous path to confining the multilingual man for five, then stretched into twenty-one, nights and days of brainwashed captivity, not all decisionmakers were aware that the ingredients were:

the photographic portrayal of human faces at a foreign students’ cultural celebration
activism on campus as a tuition-free, government-sponsored, foreign student
his inherited Tutsi ethnicity associated to his father’s four-star ranking military career
a snitch call voiced by a friendly countrymate from the dormitory to higher-ups
a crime de lèse-majesté due to the embassy’s presidential portrait, photographed on the floor
chemical traces of an organic drug, found in his pee by the secret police of the tech hub district
odors of a brand of cheap cigarettes, eponymous with Mao’s and the complex housing their party
an hours-long invitation to tea in the company of, and paid for by, Chinese state security agents
printed letters carried to Beijing, warning of terror from him, stamped by his fatherland’s diplomats
his photos in military attire captured while shooting movies about Chinese heroes warring overseas
an overdose of suspicion for bowing to Muslim religion, evidenced by logs of past travels to Egypt
a record of raising digital money relieving like-minded Sindumuja protesters in Bujumbura’s streets
the forceful mid-air rerouting to Uzbekistan of an Egyptair airplane carrying his father to his rescue
the shutdown of airspace traffic atop the powerful city of the second-in-line terrestrial nation-state
…and other accusations, documented or imagined.

awalkaday 59-2022 → From inside a tunnel, a pedestrian underpass in Namur, everything points toward the opening at the far end. One figure near the light, barely visible. The list above has just ended. The geometry here has only one direction.

Humanitarian Camp ‘Belgrade’

Once upon the summer of 2017, Chris had been residing in the Red Cross camp of Belgrade on the outskirts of Namur, Belgium, for almost ten months — since the day of his 24th wintertime birthday — as a newly arrived asylum seeker.

To combat prolonged boredom and physical inactivity, an idea sparkled in his mind, urging him to combine all of his skills — black-and-white photography, visual design, and software coding — to launch an artistic project.

Using rudimentary photographic equipment and online public platforms, coupled with an open-source digital toolbox, he has visually documented a years-long journey that artfully depicts outdoor walks in exile, and logs publicly footprints around a non-native land.

A Belgian Questions, An African Answers

In the absence of photographic evidence of the surreal story — made in and imported from China — a portion of those ingredients ended up being recycled against his appetite during the first course of Belgian legal asylum procedures (2016-2018) served to his volunteering female lawyer.

Until the day his exhausted mind and hypervigilant body gave an incorrect location—his father was in Rwanda, he told the male judge, though this was untrue. Then life spiraled: from the courtroom question «Il est où ton papa?» (‘Where is your father?’) to spinning like a «toupie» (‘spinning top’)—untethered, directionless, out of control.

Loss, Silence, Rebirth

After half a year of posting on Instagram and coding on GitHub — from the second continent he had discovered in his lifetime — the mission was abruptly halted. His laptop crashed; his smartphone was stolen. Both losses occurred within the refugee camp enclosure in Francophone Belgium, at the start of 2018.

Three years later, during the season of blooming lush gardens in 2020, the photographic odyssey relaunched. Funded by earnings from a painting job, the lonely photo walks were ran from an attic room in Bastogne — near the Belgian-Luxembourg border — until the season of dry skin shivering in 2022.

The Long Endurance

Since day one, the photographer lacked rights to knock on doors of medical care and health insurance buildings. Step by step, he grew accustomed to refusal of humanitarian aid and expulsion from banking services. His social status and life as an immigrant remained uncertain, hopeless, angst-inducing and precarious.

He faced recurring unemployment despite numerous skills. He walked — burning organic calories instead of emitting gas pollutants — and killed two birds with one stone: environmental virtue and economic necessity. In stark contrast with modern European cultural conventions, awalkaday.art stuck around neither as a state-sponsored artistic endeavor, nor as a brick-and-mortar art gallery.

One question strolled through his mind, circling the nervous pathways during every walk: “What if these walks, these photographs, these commits… what if none of it yields positive results as by-products? What if the State still says no?”

A question answered intuitively by Chronos, the Greco-Roman God of Time: “Fear not. Time will tell.” And then, quieter, the Catholic God whispered telepathically one word — a Hebrew loanword naturalized through Greek to Latin — to his inner ear: “Amen.”

In the spring of 2024, the photographic tool rung like some years ago, as if it were imitating a Church bell, to notify of the State’s final, unappealable, and negative decision. His handheld computer sounded as ding-dong memories from past years of remote intrusions. Weeks later, phone calls rushed in, then were unanswered intuitively. However, the pace of outdoor walks was increased to donate to the Red Cross his body’s lifesaving liquids one year later — in the spring of 2025.

The Englishmen’s adage “a walk a day keeps the doctor away” ceased to be true for the photographer, eight years post-conception of the project, by the grace of a Belgian network of caring women: a doctor, an ex-girlfriend, an anthropologist, a retired nurse, a public agent, a filmmaker, scientists, artists, etc.

These walks became his penance, his pilgrimage, his enterprise for clinging to life. Not winking at courts — they had already judged — but to Time itself.

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