Sculpture Biennial in Ougadougou

A work by Samuel Nnorom

The first biennial devoted to contemporary sculpture on the African continent, the International Biennial of Sculpture of Ouagadougou (BISO) is a key artistic event for Africa and its diaspora, dedicated to sculpture in all its forms. After the success of the first two editions, in 2019 with Dare to Invent the future, and in 2021 with The Ambiguous Adventure, the BISO biennial is back in 2023 with The Fire of Origins, strengthening its position as a platform for the promotion of artists and contemporary sculpture through exhibitions and residencies.

“A saga at the heart of colonization, The Fire of Origins spreads from the bush to the city, in the footsteps of a hero in revolt, Mandala Mankunku. From his legendary birth to his final years, Mandala's life tells the story of his country, Congo, and his continent, Africa. The bloody construction of the Congolese railway, the control of the country, and until the massive use of men during the war of 1940, where Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the Congo will constitute the bases of “Free France”. Swept away by the colonial power, worn down by political struggles and then war, old even in the eyes of his children who left to seek modernity in the West, Mandala Mankunku will have to rediscover the fire of his origins.”

A classic epic showing the transmutation of African territory and people by European colonization, The Fire of Origins is the second novel by Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala. The book was awarded with the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique Noire in 1987. At the centre of this saga, the main character, Mandala Mankunku, “blacksmith, son of a blacksmith” and

“master sculptor: in wood, in bronze, in stone”. He has surprisingly green eyes - “glaucous, palm-green, phosphorescent eyes”, “green eyes of nyctalope animal”, mamba colour, malachite. A creative genius, eager for knowledge and emancipation, Mandala Mankuku adapts and fiercely resists colonial power through his art.

With The Fire of Origins, the author becomes the chemist and observer of a new African intellectual and spiritual paradigm, a synthesis of holistic sapience specific to Africa, augmented by the sum of globalized knowledge. We find this alliance in the arts, where ancestral craft techniques - sculpture, beading, ironwork, textiles, ceramics, painting - are

perpetuated with their technical developments by artists from the Continent and its diasporas.

This matrix and animist fire evokes the passionate relationship that everyone can have with their intimate geographies - and echoes the eruptive and devouring character of origins in an Afro-diasporic context. It is thus found in the work of the Guadeloupean poet and novelist Daniel Maximin who develops a Volcanism, an ode to the molten magma of creolized

individuals in Soufrières (1987), L'isolé soleil (1989), L'invention des désirades (2000) and with the Afro-American James Baldwin, at the core of the United States identities in The Fire Next Time (1963).

Sculpture is also an original, unifying and regenerating fire of art in Africa. The choice of this theme for this 2023 edition of the International Biennial of Sculpture of Ouagadougou (BISO) is also a tribute to the Burkinabe metallurgical tradition, to the fire of the oven and the forge.