BARCELONA, SPAIN.- The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) presents the exhibit BAMAKO’05. Another World through January 28, 2007. Like “Bamako 03”, presented at the CCCB in 2004, the exhibition “Bamako 05” has two principal objectives. First, it sets out to offer a closer look at contemporary African photography, a particularly outstanding field on the artistic scene of that continent which, despite its geographic proximity, remains largely unknown to us as regards its culture and art.

Second, it aims to publicize the importance of Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, a biennial event that, after six outings, is now consolidated as one of the continent’s major artistic meeting points.

With these objectives as its starting point, and thanks to an agreement with the organizers of the Rencontres in Bamako, the exhibition at the CCCB comprises a large selection of approximately 330 photographs from the most interesting submissions to the 2005 show, which ran from 10 November to 10 December, plus printed and film documentation.

The selection respects the core structure of the Rencontres, with a competitive central international exhibition (this year with the theme “Another world”), and a series of monographic sections centring on specific photographers, themes or countries.

The photographs selected for the presentation of this exhibition at the CCCB are organized around the following sections:

• A selection of some 100 photographs from the international exhibition, including winning works at Bamako 2005 by the photographers Rana El Nemr (Egypt), Uchechukwu James Iroha (Nigeria), Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa) and Zohra Bensemra (Algeria)


• One of the monographic shows, in this case the work of Malick Sidibé, born in Mali in 1936

• Two tributes to great African photographers: the recently deceased John Mauluka (Zimbabwe, 1932-2003) and the veteran Ranjith Kally, born in South Africa in 1925

• One of the “national” exhibitions, devoted to Algeria, with some 100 photographs and

• the photographic work of visual artists with approximately 20 exhibits, including those of Jane Alexander (South Africa) and Pascal Marthine Tayou (Cameroon).

In addition to the presentation of original photographs, the exhibition at the CCCB includes a section of bibliographic documentation and a space for videographic documentation about the previous Rencontres.

Between 2003 and 2005, the Bamako biennial experienced a subtle but significant change in title. In 2003 the title was Ves Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine; in 2005 it was VIes Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie.

From a meeting about African photography to an African meeting about photography—a simple permutation of terms, but an important conceptual reformulation. It is a clear expression of the desire not to categorize the biennial as a localist, particularist event, even a continent-wide particularism, much less as an ethnic happening.

The Rencontres in Bamako have never been any of the above, but it is wise and healthy to eliminate any possible confusion. If, geographical origin of the authors aside, it is meaningless to speak of European photography (or contemporary European art, or so many other cultural manifestations), or Asiatic or Latin American photography, it is even more so in the case of Africa. Quite as much as any other continent, and contrary to commonplaces and prejudices, in the last two centuries Africa has been fully exposed to the influences, hybridizations and upsets caused by general processes of modernization and globalization. In addition, Africa is, more than any other, the continent of diaspora, from the slave trade to today’s migratory processes. Today, the whole world is present in Africa, and Africa is present all over the world. All too often dramatically present.

To claim that there is an essential, ancestral, pure, authentic, uncontaminated “Africanness” is, consciously, innocently or otherwise, to condemn the individuals of African origin to a second-class human condition, to being no more than living fossils, passive victims of a series of conditions—and ways of seeing—imposed from the outside rather than active agents of their own becoming.

Hence the relevance of the change in the title of the Rencontres of Bamako and hence, too, the relevance of the theme proposed as the core of the international exhibition, the main section of the various shows that make up the biennial: “Another world.”

The proposal of a photographic exploration of another world does not mean looking for a utopia, either old or new, or a transcendent reality. The proposal is much simpler and far more ambitious. It is a poetic, profoundly realistic proposal, based on Paul Éluard’s plain, straightforward formulation: “Il y a un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci.” Yes, there is another world, but it is inside this one. By this token, the proposal is an incitement to take a new look, freed from stereotypes, at the complexity and wealth of a series of realities that our blasé eyes, dulled and overloaded with images, tend to simplify or simply to ignore. To discover all that is possible within the real. The other worlds that Bamako proposes are, then, both a dimension of the more everyday reality and the potentiality of our faculties of perception and action.

The selection from Bamako’05 presented at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) includes the work of 13 of the 39 photographers chosen for the biennial’s international exhibition. All of them offer a subjective viewpoint that, as Simon Njami says, “does not seek to impose itself as an axiom but to present a proposal, a possibility, an alternative”. They seek not to say “this is the reality” but “this too is a reality”. By means of their subjectivity, they extend and enrich the way we see.

The Barcelona exhibition also presents three monographic exhibitions devoted respectively to John Mauluka, Malick Sidibé and Ranjith Kally.