Felicitations Diébédo Francis Kéré! Kéré has won the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Although Burkinabe architect Diébédo Francis Kéré is not Malian, his work holds a very special presence in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Kéré’s firm was engaged to breathe new life into the Parc National du Mali back in 2010 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Mali’s independence.

The centerpiece of the park’s refreshed design is the restaurant that sits embedded into one of the rocky hills of the grounds of the park. One of Kéré’s trademarks is using elements and materials that are a part of the context they are in. You can see this a work in every project his firm works on, not just in Bamako.

The Parc National du Mali holds a special place in my own life because I spent A LOT of time there with my oldest daughter when she was a baby. Although we did not go into the iconic restaurant a lot, we did spend go the to Tea House a lot to chill, drink tea and eat some of the best croissants I had ever had until my first stay in Paris (a story for another day).

After sitting with his work for a while it is very easy to see the 5 principles Kere says make “great” architecture:
1. Involve the community
2. Innovate with local knowledge and materials
3. Use minimal resources
4. Design with regional sensibilities and traditions
5. Build architecture that improves equality

You can read the full article here.

I hope to do a Kere tour to see all the projects he has built, I think it would be dope to do an architecture, culture, and cuisine tour of his works…

Here are a few links to more of Kere’s work: HERE ,HERE, HERE, & HERE

2021 The Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography / Les Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie

I was so excited to see the recent announcement of the curatorial team for the 2021 Les Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie . I experienced this festival for the first time while living in Bamako between 2013 and the end of 2016, it was curated and conceived by the late great, Bisi Silva.
It is hard to put into words how amazing this festival was and the people it brought to Bamako. It was such an amazing feeling to be moving around with all these creative Africans and to be playing a bit of a tour guide since I had been in town for almost a year by the time the biennial came back around.

Although the Biennale focus was photography there were so many other art-related events around the city and even at the Musee National; I think it is was here where I met Abdoulaye Konate for the first time. I would later write a poem about 2 of his works, click here to check out the poem. It was also at this time that I become closer with a collective of young Malian artists lead by painter, Amadou Sanogo, calling themselves Atielier Badialan 1. It was an exciting time to be there.

Today all that excitement came rushing back when I saw the announcement of the curatorial team led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung ,an amazing curator and arts administrator based in Berlin (shout out also to Anna Jager, for our awesome conversations about poetry when we met in Bamako).

My excitement went up another level after perusing the Biennale’s website and finding an essay explaining the “full concept” of the show. The overarching theme of the show is written in the Bambara “Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono” which translates to “The Persons of The person are Multiple in the Person.” To see the show titled in Bambara was amazing on its own, but my eyes and heart exploded to see that the curators had chosen to open the essay with excerpts from the work of Sonia Sanchez.

This is exactly the kind of bi-directional exchange that I am hoping to support, foster and document over at Black Ekphrastic This is particularly exciting because Sanchez’s work is in a sense being used as prompt and guiding principle for the artists to think about the work they will submit.

To me this continues to drive the point that the work of African (Continental and Diasporic) creative writers are vital and can been seen ad utilized as critical texts in how we understand African art making and cultural work..

Looks like I am going to have to dust off my passport and head back over there for this one…

Shifting

I originally started this website because I had grand visions of documenting my life in Mali when Mel and moved there almost 8 years ago now. Time has flown. In a nutshell, I think I think I was too busy living to spend time documenting my life in this way. Instagram might have been a better choice…Oh well.

I toyed with the idea of merging this site with my other site fredjoiner.com and just tagging these posts at #boomforrealbamako, that may still happen at some point, but for now, I think I am going to use this space to talk about arts and creative stuff in Africa more broadly, no that I have had some time away to really think about my experiences there. There will always be an arts focus somewhere in the mix, but I might insert some other stuff in there too.

Stayed tuned…

Another sad day for Mali

Image courtesy of Janet Goldner’s Facebook Page

In the first few months of my time in Mali, I was blessed to meet ad fellowship with some people that have made my trip here all the more pleasurable Kandioura Coulibaly, was one of those people. Coulibaly passed away last night. Coulibaly was one of the founding members of Groupe Bogolan Kasobané, which is an artist collective who focus is to preserve the textile and craft traditions of Mali.

While visiting his home he showed me some of the amazing jewelry, textile pieces and some of the amazing contemporary bogolan work he (and his collective) are doing. Coulibaly also showed me some really amazing Malian antique sculptures, beads and other items that his collective have been stewards of for many years. Some of the marking and inscriptions on these items only Coulibaly, his collective and other initiates know the meaning of; they are vital to the preservation and promotion of Mali art and culture.

I left his home that day inspired not only by what I saw, but also because of what I learned and conversation we had. Although Bamako is a large city that sometimes it feels very much like a small village, I would randomly run him at different art events and the like. The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago at the RENCONTRES DE BAMAKO and everything seemed fine, but we did not get a chance to talk at length, beyond greeting each other. Now I wish I had made the time to speak to him a little longer.

As Mali attempts to weather the winds of some tough times ahead, the loss of an artist of this caliber is really a horrific blow, one that unfortunately the politicians will not feel. The worst part of this lack of recognition of Mali’s cultural treasures and social fabric are some of the most powerful tools that  Mali has to combat the current realities here on the ground.

Click here for Janet Goldner’s essay from Poetics of Cloth, which talks a little bit about Groupe Bogolan Kasobané.

I will be adding more links as I dig them..so stay tuned…

Full Circle: cool art stuff in Bamako

If you have been following this or my other blog, you know that I was honored to have my poem selected as the winner of The Divine Comedy Poetry contest at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. The contest is one the events connected to the new exhibition,  The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.  
Well, about a week before we left to make our way to the States (with a nice stopover in Paris, my first visit to the City of Lights!), I had the honor of meeting, Abdoulaye Konate whose work inspired my poem, Below as Above, at an opening that he at the Musee National Du Mali for  an exhibition of his that would be traveling to Brazil.

Here are some images from that event:

And while we were in DC Melanie snuck a picture of Naomi and I standing next to Konate’s work:

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Below as Above (cross-posted from fredjoiner.com)

A few days ago I found out my poem was chosen as the winner for The Divine Comedy Poetry contest at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

The contest is one the events connected to the new exhibition,  The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.  

Abdoulaye Konaté b. 1953, Mali Dance of Kayes from La Danse series 2008 Textile, each: approx. 246.4 x 170.2 cm (97 x 67 in.). Collection of Saro León

Abdoulaye Konaté
b. 1953, Mali
Dance of Kayes from La Danse series
2008
Textile, each: approx. 246.4 x 170.2 cm
(97 x 67 in.).
Collection of Saro León

My poem was in response to Malian textile artist, Abdoulaye Konate’s 2008  Dance of Kayes from La Danse series, as seen above. Read the poem here.

I choose Konate’s work not only because he is Malian, but because his exhibition at the Institut Francais of Mali , was the one of the only art of a Malian artist I had seen other than Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita, Alioune Bâ and a few others – all photographers.  Painter, Amadou Sanogo, was the other Malian artist’s work that I had seen, aside of the famous Malian photographers.

I also chose Konate’s piece because of the cool colors he chose to represent Kayes are not what I expected given that the Kayes region is one of the hottest places on the planet, so the contrast was quite striking.

I was asked to read the poem at the Museum’s Divine Poetour this summer on July 2. Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team and NMAfA’s Teen Ambassadors, will be reading their works that engage the The Divine Comedy exhibition.  So come out and support the DC Youth Slam Team and NMAfA’s Teen Ambassadors. Peep the flyer below…

The Divine Poetour, July 2nd @NMAfA

The Divine Poetour, July 2nd @NMAfA

I am excited to be a part of The Divine Poetour, it looks like it will be similar to a project that I did afew years back as a collaboration between The American Poetry Museum and The Phillips Collection.

 

A Late Ellingtonian in Bamako: An Ellington Birthday Meditation…

bamakotoboola

This map shows where Boola, Guinea is in relationship to Bamako, Mali

I came to Ellington late in life. Despite the fact that my Pops worked with him and Mercer. It was like that with most jazz music, I was late.

When I did catch on I had a whole library of music at my disposal to really get down with, but I can say without a doubt the 2 albums that really caught my attention and held it for quite some some time. One was, an IMPULSE! release,  Duke Ellington & John Coltrane  and the other was Money Jungle with Mingus and Max (United Artists 1963, Blue Note 1987 and 2002). If you are not familiar with these recordings…do yourself a favor…

Pops told me about Duke and told me how he had traveled the world as musician with the US Government. I later came to find out it was with the US Department of the State’s Jazz Ambassadors. In this program Ellington and his band traveled throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

While listening to a segment of Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source, Lydon’s guest Harvey Cohen author of  Duke Ellington’s America. In the segment Cohen talks at length about Ellington’s  Black, Brown and Beige, which was first envisioned by Ellington as an opera. The opera’s main character was a timeless African American man named Boola and the music of Ellington’s band was written as a companion to Boola’s 39-page narrative in verse, where he talks about his life from the belly of a ship to the present (Ellington’s day). This really piqued my interest so I do some Google searches. What I found further piqued my interest and set off more questions. Turns out that Boola is the name of a region in Guinea. This made think that perhaps Ellington in his travels met someone from Boola, or maybe someone told him about the region, whatever the case; I don’ think it was coincidence that he named this character Boola, nor that Boola’s experiences became the basis for Black, Brown and Beige and many of those compositions are meant as “tone parallels” to the Boola’s monologues.

A few days ago as I was preparing this post, I found that in addition to Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington made other albums that expressed his interests and gaze toward Africa, The Togo Brava Suite is one such recording. Ellington may not have articulated it as such, but it appears that he was creating work that was pan-African. I wonder how far Ellington would have taken his pan-African efforts and how would that have affected our understanding of African music as classical music (not Classical music)?  Was Boola’s verse narrative the first perform-a-form?

Over the 3 years that I will be here in Africa, if I get a chance to visit Boola I will report back on what I find…

 

The Power of Language

The English language has power, plain and simple. I have been observing this more and more in my efforts to re-learn French and to learn Bamanakan ( and hopefully Fulbe and Wolof too).

Almost everyday I meet people who speak or want to learn English, sometimes at the expense of losing their mothertongues. As someone whose family has close ties to the Gullah language, I am particularly sensitive to people losing or giving up their mothertongues; because once we give them up they tend to disappear forever.

While I am living and traveling in West Africa, I am determined to learning as much about the languages here as I possibly can, not in an effort to “save” or “preserve” these languages, but in an effort to gain more understanding about where the richness of the art and culture come from.

Over the past 7 months that I have lived here in Bamako I have been blessed with the opportunity to conduct a few writing workshops at both The American School of Bamako and  Lycee Francais Libertie. Both workshops were great fun and I feel like I really connected with the students with the  material I covered.

The last of these workshops I had the privilege of working with some students who had just returned from a trip to New York City, visiting Harlem and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Their teacher had been teaching them about the Civil Rights Movement and she asked me as a writer and a African American to come to her class and to help them with their presentations and to share some poems with them.

Although the bulk of my library is back in DC, I do have a little stash that I brought with me. In that stash was Joseph Ross’ Gospel of Dust and Dr. Jeffrey Lamar Coleman. It was a pleasure to share the work of people that were not only friends of mine, but have produced and edited collected work that engages the world of ideas that illuminates a very important period of American History.

This is the second time (the first was in Northern Ireland) while traveling internationally I have been told and witnessed how important the Civil Rights Movement was to people outside of the United States.

Gospel of Dust by Joseph Ross