People dance to the Caribbean rhythm of pachanga, so popular in the Sixties in West Africa as well, putting on an LP by the Puerto Rican Tito Rodríguez with his orchestra, or the more melodic El «Ray» Criollo by Ray Barretto and Charanga Pachanga by the «king of the sauce» Pablo Tito Rodríguez Lozada.
Malick Sidibe
But it is the passion for the twist that is really going crazy in the ballrooms of Bamako, as the French director Robert Guédiguian recalls in the film Twist in Bamako (2021), declared homage to Malick Sidibé (Soloba, Mali 1936-Bamako 2016) and to his photographs that convey the most authentic «joie de vivre».
A vitality that is the mirror of the times – from independence from France, in 1960, to a government hypothesis under the banner of real socialism (later wrecked) – which, in the photographer’s black and white images, translates into a contagious euphoria born from the sharing of values and, in particular, the exuberance of youth. Social mores have evidently changed: in the section dedicated to his work, throughout the exhibition Ritratti is African. Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe, Samuel Fosso, curated by Filippo Maggia at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste (until 11 June 2023), we see young couples embracing on the banks of the Niger, improvising picnics on the dusty road, posing during a family party, «sleepy following a busy party» ( as the title of the 1963 photo indicates) or perhaps in a group, like those girls who almost all wear the same printed fabric dress and show a smile to the albums of the most popular musicians. Then there are those, like Mademoiselle Ouman Doumbia, who have themselves portrayed in the studio, in front of the painted backdrop, while pretending to drive a real Vespa: we are in 1973. Many mopeds and motorcycles have entered the studio Malick’s pose room, which Sidibé (the first African artist to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2007 Venice Biennale) had opened in 1962 in the popular Bagadadji neighborhood in Bamako.
“At the time it was also a way to show that you had an open mind, Western-style.” – He told me in 2010 when I interviewed him for the manifesto on the occasion of his solo show La vie en rose at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia – «Many young people let themselves be photographed with a cigarette, even if none of them smoked». I also have some photos of Studio Malick that I took in 2005 in Bamako: Sidibé was abroad, visiting exhibitions, in his absence to do the honors he had left behind three of his children (Fousseni, Mody and Karim) and many boxes of negatives, stacked on top of each other, contact sheets and modern prints (without edition) partly signed and sold for a few hundred euros. In the photo studio there was also the blue-bladed fan, near the black-and-white checkered raised floor, because there were still many customers who had their pictures taken by him.
The relay
«We might venture a sort of relay between the three artists: Keïta active in the years preceding the independence of Mali (in 1960), then Sidibé who lives and recounts the years immediately following independence, and finally Fosso, born in the period which several African countries achieve independence. – writes Filippo Maggia in the exhibition catalog (Electa) – «A relay that we also find in the contents of their images, as if the narrative thread traced by Keïta at the end of the forties had then found its own evolutionary path that runs hand in hand with the progressive conquest and manifestation of a conscious Africanness, a distinctive sign detectable in their portraits, which not by chance become self-portraits in Fosso».
The exhibition, produced and organized by ERPAC – Regional Body for Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia brings together around a hundred works by these authors from the collections of CAAC The Contemporary African Art Collection in Geneva, the Jean Marc Patras gallery in Paris, the Modena Foundation Visual Arts and Guido Schlinkert. These are mainly modern gelatin silver prints but there is also a small and precious selection of vintage Malick Sidibé. Before this exhibition, the photographs of Keïta, Sidibé and Fosso had only been exhibited together in an exhibition in Sweden and Norway (2002-2003) and before that, in 1997, when these great masters were invited to make portraits and self-portraits for the Tati department store on Boulevard de Rochechouart in Paris. Samuel Fosso (Kumba, Cameroun 1962, lives and works between Nigeria and France) on that occasion created the series of color self-portraits in which he wears the clothes of an African village chief à la mode (iconic image also published on the cover of the catalog of Africa Remix, a historic exhibition on African contemporary art curated in 2004 by Simon Njami), as well as a rocker, a pirate, a bourgeois woman and also of La Femme américaine libérée des années 70, a tribute to the strength of African American women .
Ditch, homage to the greats
Photographs that anticipate the subsequent “disguises” of the African Spirits series (2008), this time in black and white, in which Fosso portrays himself as Angela Davis or in the many and sometimes controversial African political leaders, among them Hailé Salassié, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah Nelson Mandela. For the photographer, the desire to “restore the memory and pay homage to all those great African characters who fought for the freedom and civil rights of blacks, both African American and African” is clear.
Seydou Keita
As for Seydou Keïta (Bamako 1921/1923-Paris 2001), who in 1948 had opened his studio in the new district of Bamako-Coura, the originality of his way of portraying above all female figures with their «wax printed» clothes that blend in with the fabric used as a backdrop (usually her bedspread which she changed every two or three years), like the rest of the discovery of her work. It was the French curator André Magnin, director of the Contemporary African Art Collection (created by Jean Pigozzi), who discovered it in 1991 following seeing the exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art in New York, in which five old photographs were exhibited in whose caption it read ‘Anonymous/Bamako/Mali/1950s’. Magnin spoke to Pigozzi and told him that, if he were still alive, he would have found that photographer: «I bought a plane ticket to Mali, booked a modest hotel and hired a driver to whom I told him I wanted to meet the city’s photographers. He took me to Malick Sidibé who was the only photographer still working in his studio. I showed him copies of the photos I had seen in New York and he immediately recognized that they were taken by Seydou Keïta and introduced him to me. In 1994 I organized his first exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris: Keïta opened his archive and I was able to see, one by one, all his photographs. » Undoubtedly people wore the most beautiful clothes to be portrayed by him. «Having a photo taken was an important event: people wanted to look their best. Often they were tense, intimidated by the camera.” – he said in the interview collected by Cristiana Perrella and Valentina Bruschi, published in the catalogue I’m not tan. Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé photography in Bamako (2001) – «I told them to relax and put themselves in a certain way, I was never wrong. I was able to make them come really well. I said I ka nyì tan, which in Bambara means you’re fine like this, don’t move and I snapped».
