A few words about your artistic career
After training as an artist at the Conservatoire Régional des Arts et Métiers in Abengourou (Côte d'Ivoire), I now live and work in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). I have three children and own my own studio. My day-to-day passions are art paintings and graphic design.
How long have you been an artist?
I've been working as a visual artist for 14 years.
Why did you apply for this scholarship? How will the scholarship support you?
My project is to create works without using academic techniques and materials, i.e. to use only cardboard packaging as the main medium of expression as well as natural and/or food pigments to create works.
What are your concrete artistic objectives after this residency?
I want to open up to the world and share my vision of the visual arts, in particular fine art painting without brushes, canvas, acrylic tubes or other academic standards.
What did you achieve during this creative residency? What is the result (work created)?
The Africalia "Creativity is life" grant enabled us to create around twenty works of art using cardboard packaging and natural pigments as raw materials.
It also enabled us to cover the costs of the studio: electricity, water, internet and so on. There were three of us during the residency. My assistants took the shots and helped me edit the videos, cut the cardboard and frame the works.
How do you think these activities help us to think about the world today, in relation to the COVID-19 crisis, and/or about building for the future?
"Knowing how to reinvent yourself" would be the theme I could give to my creative residency.
The whole world, shaken by the COVID 19 health crisis, will have to reinvent itself to cope with a new way of life.
Just as the cardboard box was originally a free tree in the forest, man was also free to move around in the past (travel, meetings, etc....).
One evening, the tree is felled and turned into cardboard, used as packaging for materials that are often less noble than itself. Just like Man, who one morning sees himself cut off from all movement and is forced to remain confined to his home and change his way of life. Often less noble than what they used to live (no more human warmth, no more collective varnishing, etc.). After being used as packaging, cardboard ends up in the dustbin, just like mankind, after having built so many life projects, finds itself on its knees as a result of the global health crisis.
So we take the cardboard packaging out of the bin and turn it into a masterpiece, just as man has to stand on his own two feet to face disease on all fronts. (Artistic, cultural, economic, social, etc....)
How did you feel during the residency? And afterwards?
During the residency, our feelings were those of the sensation and conviction of overcoming the health crisis. And at the end of the residency, our feelings were those of freedom, true freedom of expression and emotion.
We were able to work as we had imagined without too much pressure and with a lot of love and conviction.
One difficulty we encountered was at a time when the number of COVID-19 patients in the Burkinabe capital was rising again. At the time, we spent days without having the courage to open the studio, but thank God we got over it straight away when together we viewed images from the residence.
