New Dreams: Imagining Gold Lives. Paintings by artist Christophe Sawadogo.
“I am from the Centre Nord in Burkina Faso, where the desert is advancing, and where the climate and the seasons impact on our lives and on the movement of the population. My parents had to migrate to neighbouring Ivory Coast, “where the grass is greener”. I remained with my aunt. Like most of my classmates, I did a lot of kilometers every day. It resurfaces in my work and can explain the pieces of paper that I put on the roads in my neighborhood, on the mine trails. Likewise, terrorism affects parts of Burkina and thousands of people are leaving their areas of residence. I see it with my artistic means, with earth, my pencils, ink and carbon.”
“My aunt wanted me to become a medical doctor but at school in Ouagadougou, I already got interested in art and visited art gatherings and exhibitions. Women in my village heard of my art and I was summoned home. There was a ‘tribunal feminine’; the women interrogated: ‘We hear you are selling paper to white people, what are you doing?’ They worried whether I could make a living as an artist and whether prices for my work were decided in all honesty. With my aunt’s approval, I moved on into the world of art. My gallery is called ‘Maan Neere’. In Moore, my language, this means ‘to do beautiful/good’. Aesthetically appealing but also morally good – combining ‘le beau et le bien’ – it expresses why art matters: anything that is just is in itself beautiful and something that is beautiful should be just and help achieve justice.”
1/2 ‘Women carrying water’ and ‘Sahel landscape’
“My aunt did not have daughters, so I was raised with tasks that are normally for the life of girls, such as fetching water and strolling in the bush with goats. In the Sahel the landscape is beautiful but it also poses hardships for residents. This is a theme of my work.”
The landscape as canvas
“It happens that the canvas is a meeting. In the physical sense of the word, that puts in the frame, the one who paints on the canvas and those who are painted, the earth that carries them and the air they breathe.”
1-3 ‘Women looking for gold’, ‘Looking for gold’ and ‘waiting in line’
“I often work with groups of people. Today, drought and precariousness affect entire sections of society. I do not fall for moralism; but I often come back to the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights).”
Woman weighing up sustainability with a gold balance
“The work of art must remain a social mirror, the reflection, the geography, the history of a world that generated it. It has nothing to do with (…) the pale copy of the West, with its dominant codes. I am convinced that art touches you if you have your own imprint on it. If we recognize each other. ”
1-4 Painting together
“To work on collective drawing and see you all smiling while taking five minutes to train your fingers in drawing, long life to Gold Matters!”
1-2 Project dreams
“You all wrote your dreams for the project and this lady came out”.
1-2 Street-art: creating the boy miner and women with a headload in Tarkwa, Ghana
“There is the movement of people going about daily lives; paper collects footprints, tire tracks and other markings. Here, the paper takes traces of the car tires. The colours shine through. Suspended between dream and reality a painting creates an opening, a window on new horizons.”
3-4 Street art: ‘boy miner’ and ‘woman with a headload’
“It has been inspiring for me to work on the boy miner and the women carrying tailings using different coloured earth from the goldfield with the drivers helping.”
