Leopold’s Legacy gathers Oliver Leu’s visual research on the afterlives of Belgian colonialism, moving between the monuments and prestige architecture that still occupy the country’s streets and the quieter paper record of antique postcards and collaged proposals for alternative monuments. Leu compiles photographs and visual sequences himself, and the result reads as an idiosyncratic archive of how a once-celebrated past persists in ordinary urban space. The Eriskay Connection published the book in 2020: 152 pages, 17 by 24 centimetres, softcover with a linen cap, designed by Carel Fransen.

The historical frame is King Leopold II, proclaimed founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State at the Berlin Conference in 1885, whose administration was characterised by forced labour, torture and murder, and whose gains from ivory and rubber returned to Belgian public and private construction. Leu does not restage that violence; he tracks its residue, examining how colonial representation remains visible and how collective perception in Europe is gradually changing.

Two writers extend the inquiry. Matthew G. Stanard, a professor of history, supplies the introduction; Bambi Ceuppens, researcher and curator at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, contributes an extensive essay. Their presence gives the visual material an evidentiary context, and the editing, shared by Leu and Fransen, keeps text and image in conversation.

For collectors engaged with documentary practice, institutional critique or the contested memory of European empire, the book’s interest lies in its method: an artist’s compilation that treats monuments, postcards and speculative counter-monuments as one continuous field, with design and sequencing integral to that argument.