Following deliberation by a jury of experts, the Leridon 2025 residency grant was awarded on Saturday, November 8, 2025, to artist Manuella Alonge at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa.
We warmly congratulate Manuella Alonge, winner of the 2025 Leridon residency grant, awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, for the quality and depth of her artistic work. We also extend our congratulations to the nine other students who applied, and wish them all the best for their future careers.
The Leridon residency grant, initiated by Gervanne and Matthias Leridon in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, supports young artistic creation by offering winners a two-month residency in Douala (Cameroon) and one month in Kinshasa (DRC), accompanied by professional mentoring, a residency presentation at the Academy, and an exhibition and sale. This program aims to encourage emerging talent and offer them an environment conducive to developing their practice and network.
Manuella Alonge is a Congolese visual artist trained in the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Her work, combining painting and collage, explores social psychology, shifting identities, and the tensions that run through contemporary societies. Through strong female figures placed in deliberately unstable environments, she highlights the contradictions, invisible legacies, and forces that shape our ways of being in the world.
Winner of the 2025 Leridon Grant, Manuella is developing the MAKANISI project (“thought” in Lingala), a visual reflection on memory, intimate and collective narratives, and how they influence creativity and personal transformation. This residency represents an essential opportunity for her to deepen her approach, refine her critical thinking, and enrich herself through contact with other artists, notably Jean-David Nkot, whose work feeds her research.
It is a decisive step in her career as an artist-researcher, focused on learning, emancipation, and openness to the world.
Born in Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ushindi Mpigiri Destin has always had a passion for drawing. After graduating from high school in 2021, he moved to Kinshasa to study fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he continues his work today as an artist-researcher. Using ballpoint pens, acrylics, and processes inspired by calotype, he develops illusionistic and sensitive works that question the social, political, cultural, and religious realities of the Congo, approaching humanity as a mystery to be explored.
The Gervanne + Matthias Leridon Collection, in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, is pleased to announce that Ushindi Mpigiri Destin is the winner of the Leridon Creation Grant. This grant provides him with financial support to continue his artistic research and experimentation, and to accompany the evolution of his practice.
Congratulations to the winner.
