Could the collapse of a shiny development dream be a Sino-Congolese literary or artistic motif ? Starting from the incident of the landslide on an emblematic cornice of the capital city, nicknamed after the President « Cor niche de Sassou » – a fallacious showcase of Congolese development largely financed by Chinese companies – which occurred on February 8, 2020, this article studies the literary and artistic representations which want to show the flip side of the Sino-Congolese « friendships » and investigate their depths and intricacies. By representing the lives of Congolese miners in pits run by Chinese companies or Chinese-led deforestation companies in the Congo, some artists attempt to overcome the reign of Sino-Congolese « abun dant junk » by offering increased representations of materiality. Bearing witness to the same ecological concern, the images seem to question the dreams of modernity with which writer Sinzo Aanza and photographers Sammy Baloji and Lu Guang confront them.