Focus sur / Burey Bambata, Yo-Yo Gonthier: Free access to the video until Sunday 10th, May

This week, we invite you to discover Burey Bambata, a work by Yo-Yo Gonthier, born in 1974 in Niamey, Niger.

Know more about the artist

Delphine Lopez, director of the Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Dakar, offers us a personal reading of this work, a super 8 sound film, in black and white (13'10''), shot in Niger. Exceptionally, the video will be available on Viméo until Sunday, May 10, 2020 at midnight.

November 24, 2016, Niamey, Niger

It is the day of the crossing 

The river is big 

The river is strong 

We're gonna have to go through

I don't know if we'll make it. 

These few words are the incipit of Yo-Yo Gonthier's latest video, Burey Bambata (The Big Clouds) that the artist made in 2019 in Niamey, Niger. These few words are the poetic manifesto of the video and, as a watermark, tell us just as much about the plastic work that the artist has developed over the last decade. A few words full of a simple and radical hope that is never lacking in the artist's images; a hope of everyday life rooted in a nature that carries meaning and history/ies. Burey Bambata, (The Great Clouds) is a collective ode to dream. Yo-Yo Gonthier chose as the protagonist of the video the Cloud, a fabric sculpture of several meters in length created in 2013 and reactivated several times during performances around the world, from Dakar to Niamey via Reunion Island and Abidjan. In this video, a visual epic shot with the Super 8 camera, Yo-Yo Gonthier brings together the whimsical reveries of an artist as a brilliant inventor and the semantic richness rooted in the history of vernacular customs that touch on both the personal history of the artist and that of a part of Africa.

A group of men, women and children gathered under the Cloud. They carry it above their heads, forming a single hybrid being with the sculpture. A procession to the Niamey River begins. It crosses inspiring landscapes of calm, closely linked to imaginary landscapes from elsewhere, but whose real character is sometimes doubted: the image generated by the Super 8 camera has here the texture of a dream. Often a tension is created in the image between the sensation of movement - the cloud that crosses the image for example - and the stability of the framing, whose bias is literally to frame a part of the landscape; where a more classical shot could have chosen to accompany the movement of the procession. By this choice, Yo-Yo Gonthier forces us to break with our habits of image consumption. Through dazzling plays of light, he plunges us into a state of active contemplation carried by the bewitching words and songs of the men in voice-over.