Bamako is hot. Very hot. 70° mornings seem almost cool compared to the scorching 95° days. All the more so because the sandstorms, light though they may be, pollute the dust to make it all the more oppressive. Just two days ago, as the fog drowned the early morning, fishermen’...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

Christian Caujolle : How does the Managing Director operate at the Rencontres of Bamako?
Samuel Sidibé : The General Manager is in many ways the General Director of the Biennale. He determines, with the Institut Français and the Artistic Directors, ...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

In November 1998, the government demolished the colonial abattoir in Accra. It was declared an environmental hazard since it stood close to the place where all of Accra’s faecal matter gets dumped. The demolition was to justify a $4.3 million grant from the Canadian International Develo...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

Nigeria has huge resources, but two of these stand out: a population of 140 million people and a vast crude oil deposit, located in the deep waters of the Delta, one of the world’s vast wetlands. In 1956, the Shell Petroleum Development Company explored and discovered crude oil in lar...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

This series focuses on the ravaged tons of wood transported on waterways to the sawmill by the river banks, the third mainland bridge, in Lagos, leaving the environment untidy and littered with dust from sawn wood. From a distance, one can see the bed of logs, serially arranged along the s...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

The West has long considered Africa a continent where anything goes. Detritus of all kinds gets dumped there. The shipping of industrial scrap metal to Tunisia has been constantly on the rise in the past several decades, fuelling a criminal syndicate run by families with government connec...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

Annobon is a distant isle four miles off the coast of Gabon, discovered by the Portuguese on New Year’s Day in 1471. Its name thus comes from anno bom, or “happy new year”. During my stay among the Annobonese, I was simultaneously surprised, seduced, and reassured. They staunchly defend th...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

The road goes nowhere really. I perceived it to have a beginning in a biosphere called Betty’s Bay, with an estimated half-way at the Cymbiflora Parrot sign and finally ending in the area of the Company Gardens, Cape Town. But this is not quite the way of my particular road map. It was meant ...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

Zantoulé Daman is a rural village in the Kola district where small-scale gold-mining goes on. Seven or eight miles further down the road deforestation is apparent, dangerous ditches have been dug for panning gold, and pits are henceforth excavated in dried-up backwaters. My work shows t...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

My pictures are taken on a human scale, recording the natural and social wealth of Djoliba, as the legendary Niger River is known. Better than abstract figures and analyses, they testify to the way Malian river-dwellers are adapting to the deterioration of their environment on a day-to-d...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

As the saying goes, life is a struggle. And the twenty-first century has indeed fallen victim to humanity’s overexploitation of the environment. Despite the risk of creating a terrible imbalance, the same refrain occurs everywhere: we should resemble
the metals and plastics we prod...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

My photos show children from the Malian town of Sikasso playing roles from traditional tales. They portray animals, moving through a fantasy world that is nevertheless an integral part of our lives. I feel that life can only be sustainable if it is based on non-superficial values and cu...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

These lemons represent people caught in the stranglehold of dictatorship and war. At first, this lemon population was harshly repressed for having demanded the rule of law, peace, freedom and progress. Unfortunately, democracy is usually won only through sacrifice, sorrow and bloodshed. Bu...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

Fashion 2112 raises questions about criteria of beauty. What will “attractiveness” look like in the future? Once the predicted disappearance of certain commodities in our consumerist world actually occurs, what will stylish people yearn to wear? In this series of photos I try t...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

My work navigates the ties, which bind subjects in a cosmopolitan family unit. The invisible thread, which joins the people in the photo together. The metaphysical space, that attracts and distracts, the shared memory. I am drawn by the strong traditions and conventions of family portraitur...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

This is the story of a road known as Route GP1. It runs along the coast from Tunis to the Libyan border, its asphalt strip following the ancient Roman roads toward Carthage, flanked by sea and olive trees. But the GP1 is a thing of the past – the highway has arrived. My photos record the li...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

The hegemonic cultural power of modern-day capitalism comes through as a major theme in our early work. Halaal Art as a body of work deals with the role and place of religion, Islam in particular, in a world that is accelerating away from notions of faith and local community – ca...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

This video is a series of photographs shot in continuous mode and edited later on, before adding conceptual sound. We are here but not here. Where things are not in their right places or when intentions are wrong, we see a man dressed in a suit paddling a bicycle with much effort but th...

31.10.2011[ read full story ]

In my latest video piece, Black Brain, I deal with the misuse of the natural resources that belong to all of humanity. I question the unequal economic relationship between North and South, as well as the market for raw materials.

31.10.2011[ read full story ]