Sous le Sahel (2001)

This installation is the result of a collective creation project by a dozen international artists, most of them using digital sound and image technologies, in January 2000 in Burkina Faso.

Initiated by the French association Les arts improvisés, the Festival de l’Eau’s main theme was an encounter between traditional arts and technological arts, through ephemeral and improvised creation. The group of nomadic artists traveled by road and river to six small villages in the Mouhoun region, at each stop setting up a camp, a generator, and all the necessary equipment to give concerts, in which women, men, and children, musicians, dancers, and singers from the villages were invited to take part.

Stemming from this experience, my project is organized into three chronicles — the canoe (pirogue), the villages, the concerts — each comprising a photographic series and a video. The arrangement and rendering of the images refer to the very essence of the encounter – the contrast of high-tech and low-tech contexts. Although the initial interest may be ethnological in nature, the document is infiltrated with meta-comments referring to the idea of the constructed – to the fictional side of our perception of elsewhere.