INDEX
1.- Exhibition credits 2
2.- Presentation 3
3.- Exhibition texts 7
4.- Catalogue 9
5.- Artists in the exhibition 11
6.- Related activities 18
7.- CV of the curator 19
8.- General information 20
1.- Exhibition credits
Bamako ● 7th African Photography Meeting – “In the City and Beyond” is a production of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in collaboration with CULTURESFRANCE / “Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie” of Bamako and the Ministry of Culture of Mali. It will run at the CCCB from 24 February to 1 June 2009.
Director of the «Rencontres africains de la photographie»
Moussa Konaté
general curator
Simon Njami
associated Curator
Samuel Sidibé
Curator of «BAMAKO ● In the City and Beyond»
Pep Subirós
Coordination
Liliana Antoniucci
Assembly design and direction
Bracha Berkovitch - Alejandro Quintillà
Graphic design of the exhibition and publicity
avanti avanti
graphic production and mounting of the exhibition
Nogales Barcelona
Decostyle
Dropi
Lightening and special mountings
Production Unit of the CCCB
audiovisuals installation
Audiovisual and Multimedia Section of the CCCB
Registration and art works installation
Registration and Conservation Unit of the CCCB
Manterola división Arte S.A.
Transport
Manterola división Arte S.A.
Insurance
Aon Gil y Carvajal
Mapfre
And the collaboration of the Service of Diffusion and External Resources, Finance and General Services, and the Documentation and Debate Centre of the CCCB.
2.- Presentation
The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona presents the exhibition Bamako – 7th African Photography Meeting, curated by Pep Subirós, from 24 February to 1 June 2009.
As in previous years, Bamako has two main objectives. The first is to present an overview of contemporary African photography, a particularly outstanding art on the creative scene of that continent, which, despite its geographical proximity, is only now beginning to receive the attention its cultural and artistic vitality deserves. The second is to showcase the importance of the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, a biennial event which, after seven outings, is now consolidated as one of Africa’s biggest artistic meeting points.
With these objectives as its base, and thanks to an agreement with the organizing bodies of the Rencontres in Bamako, the show at the CCCB presents the pick of the 2007 event: some 200 photographies and a selection of original videos, and printed and film documentation.
Content
With the title “In the City and Beyond”, most of the seventh Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie de Bamako centres on the theme of the urban phenomenon. The urban phenomenon rather than the city because, over and beyond the usual reductive views that see cities as material, functional structures and devices, they are, in reality, fundamentally networks of relations between individuals and social groups.
In addition to its specific theme, represented in particular by a selection of some 150 photographs from the “International Exhibition”, this latest review of the Rencontres at the CCCB includes the “Tribute” to a foremost African photographer, the late Serge Jongué (Guyana, 1951-2006); a “Monograph” given over entirely to Samuel Fosso[1], one of the great contemporary creators who are taking photography to the forefront of the visual arts; and, finally, a selection of the original videos submitted in the section “New Images”.
Urban Africa (under construction)
Text by the exhibition curator, Pep Subirós, from the catalogue
"la forme d'une ville /
change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur d'un mortel..."
Charles Baudelaire
Under the title “In the city and beyond”, the 7th Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako was dedicated to the theme of urbanity. I say urbanity and not the city because beyond the usual reductive views that see urban enclaves basically as material and functional structures and devices, the reality is that cities are, fundamentally, networks of material and immaterial relations – between individuals and social groups – and this is the dimension that the photographers participating in the Rencontres have emphasised. Of course.
Deep down, what radically distinguishes urban life from rural life – the city from the countryside – is not the size of the inhabited centres, nor the materials or height of the buildings, nor the infrastructures, nor even the type of economy that develops – or agonises – there but the fact that in the urban world nobody can live self-sufficiently; because nobody, absolutely nobody, produces what they need to live. What’s more, urbanites depend not only on their immediate fellow citizens to satisfy their most minimal needs, but also on a network of exchanges with the exterior, with a more or less large hinterland. Nowadays, this hinterland is already, evidently, the whole world. In the cities, the Robinson Crusoes have no future.
And, it goes without saying, this extreme inter-dependency, inherent to urban life, implies a permanent process of negotiation of interests that do not always coincide, which now and again can erupt in the form of conflicts. As Simon Njami reminds us, in citing Roland Barthes, “the city, essentially and semantically, is the site of our encounter with the other”. The site of our encounter, yes, and therefore, insofar as it is a stable, continual encounter, a place of necessary understanding, or at least, of agreement. Which means recognition of and respect for the other, the others.
In the same way this interdependency, and its constant transformative dynamics, also brings with it a permanent demand for renewal, for creativity, in all fields, from the most basic questions for survival, to the most sophisticated expressions of a moral and aesthetic nature. Modes of urban life, urbanity, thus become the city’s heart and soul.
In this sense, cities belong as much or more to the order of the intangibles – dreams (or nightmares) that are more or less naive, more or less fleeting, always changing; promised lands of aspirations, of hopes, of freedom; receptacles and breeding grounds for all insecurities and miseries – than to that of the apparent solidity of their bricks and stones, their steel and concrete. Claude Lévi-Strauss left it written in an axiomatic way: “Cities have often been likened to symphonies and poems, and the comparison seems to me a perfectly natural one: they are, in fact, objects of the same kind. The city may even be ranked higher, since it stands at the point where Nature and artifice meet. A city is a congregation of animals whose biological history is enclosed within its boundaries; and yet every conscious and rational act on the part of these creatures helps to shape the city’s eventual character. By its form, as by the manner of its birth, the city has elements at once of biological procreation, organic evolution, and aesthetic creation. It is both natural object and cultural subject; individual and group; something lived and something dreamed; it is the human invention par excellence”.1
No region can be more suitable for exploring the greatnesses and problems of cities than the African continent. Because Africa continues to be, for better or for worse, not only the best revealer of our past but the laboratory of our future.
Nowhere more than in African cities today is the drama of the modern city’s transformation and exponential growth played out in such a raw way – on a background of a rural pauperisation induced by extreme forms of unequal exchange, a process aggravated in our times by the omnimodal power of global and impersonal economic forces, very real but inapprehendable phantoms.
Also being experienced there, in a kind of general rehearsal, is the configuration of the city that is taking shape around the world, with perhaps more disingenuous forms: urban fabrics coming apart at the seams; tattered mosaics where fortified enclaves and informal settlements coexist, touching each other, without centre or periphery, or where the periphery is the centre; places difficult to breathe, where the public powers seem to have resigned from their responsibilities, if they ever really assumed them, where the majority of basic services are more privatised by the day.
And yet, in African cities, an unstoppable life beats, where nothing is wasted, with individual initiatives and forms of collective solidarity that fill the void of public services, with artistic expressions integrated into everyday ways of life and work, perhaps because life is an art that has to be invented there each day.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the images offered to us by the photographers at the last Rencontres in Bamako place the accent on the fragility of the city and urban life, on the half-built or half-demolished buildings, on the passing of anonymous legs, on the shadows, on the disconcertment of those who live there. But also on the resistances, the daily struggles, the defiant look of the young people, the creativity, the playing... The whole in search of an as yet undefined, magmatic, mutating urbanity permanently under construction and reconstruction... Like in all living cities.
Under construction. For the presentation in Barcelona of the 7th Bamako Biennial, I have allowed myself to borrow the title of the great film by José Luis Guerín, partly as a tribute and partly because I believe that it perfectly reflects the spirit that gives life to African cities, and also because the Rencontres photographers’ view of the city can help us renew our view of our own urban realities under constant construction/reconstruction, such as the Raval in Barcelona. A construction/reconstruction whose future depends not only on the physical dimension of the city, but and above all on the emergence or not of a new urbanity more sensitive to – and respectful of – the concrete, individual, plural and changing reality of its inhabitants. An urbanity for which the city, in words used by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall regarding Johannesburg, but that can be extended to all large cities, “is not only a string of infrastructures, technologies and legal entities, however networked these are. It also comprises actual people, images and architectural forms, footprints and memories; the city is a place of manifold rhythms, a world of sounds, of private freedom, pleasures, and sensations”.2
Beyond this specific theme, and as in previous presentations of the Bamako Rencontres at the CCCB, the proposal’s general aim is twofold: firstly, to offer a close-up of contemporary African photography, a sphere especially highlighted in the creative panorama of a region that is just now starting to receive the attention that its cultural and artistic vitality deserves; and secondly, also to raise awareness of the importance and value of the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, an event which, after seven editions, has become consolidated as one of the continent’s great artistic rendezvous, with increasing recognition and international projection.
Consistent with this spirit, the exhibition «Bamako ● 7th african photography meeting – In the city and beyond» offers a broad selection from the last Rencontres event, while respecting, in its essential aspects, the structure of the biennial, which is based around a central collective international exhibition of a competitive nature, and a series of monographic sections.
Thus, the exhibition includes the following sections: a) a selection of approximately 150 photographs from the international exhibition; b) one of the exhibitions paying tribute to great African photographers who have recently passed away, dedicated to Serge Jongué (Guayana, 1951-2006); c) the signature monographic exhibition dedicated to Samuel Fosso, one of the great contemporary creators who are putting photography at the forefront of the visual arts; d) finally, a selection of the creative videos presented in the new section “New images”, a clear indication of how the Bamako biennial, in addition to breaking with stereotyped notions of African realities, is also renewing traditional disciplinary considerations and opening up to all those artistic expressions that have their central reference point in photography.
1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes tropiques, Paris 1955
2. Mbembe, Achille and Nuttall, Sarah (ed.), «Writing the World from an African Metropolis», Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, special issue of Public Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 347-372.
3.- Exhibition texts
International exhibition
Nowhere more than in African cities today is the drama of the modern city’s transformation and exponential growth again played out in such a raw way – on a background of a rural pauperisation induced by extreme forms of unequal exchange, a process aggravated in our times by the omnimodal power of global and impersonal economic forces, very real but inapprehendable phantoms.
Also being experienced there, in a kind of general rehearsal, is the configuration of the city that is taking shape around the world: urban fabrics coming apart at the seams; tattered mosaics where the periphery is the centre; places where the public powers seem to have resigned from their responsibilities, where day by day the majority of basic services are increasingly privatised.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the images offered to us by the photographers at the last Rencontres place the accent on the fragility of the city and urban life, on half-built or half-demolished buildings, on the passing of anonymous legs, on shadows, on the disconcertment of those who live there. But also on the resistance, the daily struggles, the defiant gaze of the young people, the creativity, the play... The whole in search of an as yet undefined, magmatic, mutating urbanity permanently under construction and reconstruction... As in all living cities.
Homage // Serge Emmanuel Jongué (1951-2006)
Born in 1951 in Aix-en-Provence, France, of a Guyanese father and a Polish mother, Serge Jongue lived and worked in Montreal, from 1974 until 2006 when he died. He was a documentary photographer. His varied origins and background enabled him to run a personal reflection, outside his professional work, on image as an immediate reference point and its artistic dimension. In his work, he created spaces –kinds of mental landscapes– where contemporary memories mingle with myth. From this urban photographic trance spring up urban places and human secrets in a magical incantation of Bamako. This syncopated breath unveils through the layers of his itinerary, an intimate and universal aspect of Bamako.
Monograph // Samuel Fosso
Born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon, he lives and works in Bangui, Central Africa Republic. He lived in Nigeria between 1965 and 1972, where he suffered from Biafra’s war before joining his brother in Bangui. After having tried a few jobs, he becomes apprentice in a photo studio. When he was 13 years old, he opened his first studio, Studio National which would become Studio Confiance and then Studio Convenance. He used scraps of film to photograph himself posing disguised and playing different roles. He sent the pictures to his family in Nigeria. For thirty years, he has been making self-portraits, which express a reflection about identity, otherness, unspeakableness, and correctness. With Chef [Celui qui a vendu l'Afrique aux colons], he evokes the role played by some Africans in pre-colonial slave trade, while with La femme américaine libérée des années 1970, he makes fun of Western images of African people and of African clichés of the rest of the world. If his compositions are sometimes sardonic or grave, they are always artistically irreproachable.