GENOA.- Ten years have passed since at the end of 2008 VisionQuesT 4rosso opened its first season with the exhibition Mario De Biasi "Yesterday, Today" starting a slightly crazy but certainly passionate adventure into contemporary photography.

I first saw Patrick Willocq’s work in 2014 at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles. The spectacular and striking images belonging to the “I am Walé respect me” series completely overwhelmed me. His rendering and re-creation of the Walé women's dreams, songs and rituals of the Ekonda tribe of the Democratic Republic of Congo were heart-stopping. They were more powerful than any other documentary photographs on the subject could have been, and reflected in every possible way, all my thoughts about fine art photography.

I am therefore very pleased to celebrate our tenth year and start the new season with Patrick's exhibition “One Finger Cannot Pick a Stone” from the commissioned project “Society and Change in Northern Ghana: Dagomba, Gonja, and the regional perspective on Ghanian History” by the Noorderlicht Foundation / African Studies Centre; a project which was finalist at the Oskar Barnack Leica Award in 2017.

Patrick writes: “This artistic documentary, a commission for Noorderlicht Foundation / African Studies Centre, produced in Yendi in the Northern Region of Ghana and in collaboration with local communities, depicts Dagomba traditions and rituals. A local proverb says that one finger cannot pick a stone, which means you have to stick together to move forward. The 6 elaborately staged scenes, bear witness to this saying and to the Dagomba rich cultural heritage to help understand how history and traditions have shaped present-day realities and the challenges ahead. For this project, I interviewed the overlord King Yaa Naa, whose court is at Yendi, various paramount chiefs, court elders, drummers and fiddlers, university academicians, an Islamic scholar and a traditional land priest. I listened to their stories and staged performative photographs from those stories, together with communities, turned into actors. To ensure a culturally accurate visual iconography, local artists and artisans helped to build the large decorative sets, using locally sourced materials.

The Dagomba are an ethnic group based in the Northern Region of Ghana. Their kingdom, called Dagbon, was established in the 12th century.

They descent from warrior immigrant groups that invaded the area and imposed their rule over the indigenous peoples. They intermarried with these people whose daughters they took as wives and whose languages and social norms they eventually adopted. Their traditions of foreign origin and the associated exploits remain and are recited by professional court drummers and fiddlers during funerals and festivals, and during investiture of traditional rulers *.

One of the major and most conspicuous features of Dagomba society is chieftaincy. Although Dagomba culture is heavily influenced by Islam, many also still believe in and worship traditional spirits and gods.”

*Dr. Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu, Research Fellow/UG Coordinator, Gonja Dagomba Project Institute of African Studies

In these highly researched, and elaborately staged, photographs on the traditions and rituals of the Dagomba tribe, Patrick has transformed his camera (even though technologically sophisticated) into an element gifted with an extraordinary conceptual simplicity: that of placing at the centre of attention his genuinely respectful approach to people, their history, culture, heritage, their lives and their desires.

The gestures of these men and women appear unfailingly measured and calibrated, making it a symbol of an entire population and possibly of an entire nation, without falling into the trap of homologation and in recognition of the profound dignity of the individual.

And in this spirit, we set the tone of all prospects and endeavours for our next ten years.

Patrick Willocq was born in 1969 in Strasbourg. He ives and works between Paris, Hong Kong and Kinshasa.

A self-taught photographer, Patrick Willocq had a midlife rebirth. It was a return trip to Congo (where he grew up) in 2009 that made him quit the professional activities he had been carrying out for twenty years in Asia, in order to devote himself fully to photography, a thirty-year commitment.

Patrick draws on his imagination the art of metamorphosing reality with poignant scenes in the image of his deep humanist convictions. With the subject entirely part of his creative process, he practices an aesthetic never devoid of ethics. In all his carefully composed performative stagings, entirely constructed in situ rather than created on Photoshop, he sends messages that pass through a participatory theatricality. His artistic practice is a hybrid between ethnology, sociology, performance, installation, video and photography.

Since 2012, he has been nominated for or chosen as a finalist or winner of multiple prestigious international awards, including SFR Jeunes Talents de Paris Photo 2012, Prix Photo de l’Agence Française de Développement 2012, Prix Découverte des Rencontres d’Arles 2014, Prix Coup de Coeur HSBC pour la Photographie 2016, Sony World Photography Awards 2016, Prix Niepce 2017, Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2014 and 2017.

His works have been exhibited at Paris Photo, AIPAD New York, Context Art Miami, Photo Basel, Joburg Art Fair, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and at the Manuel Rivera Ortiz Foundation at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles. He has also been featured in numerous TV broadcasts and publications, including CNN Amanpour, Arte, France 5, TV5 Monde, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Stern, Polka, Le Monde and Paris Match.

Patrick is co-author, with director Florent de La Tullaye, of a 52-minute documentary film, Le Chant des Walés, broadcast on the television channel France 5 with a preview at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris at the end of 2016.