Mali

"In 1998, I knew nothing about the Sahel. I went to stay in Bamako for the first time. Two months without rain. (…) One day, I told Seydou Keïta that I wouldn’t be back to paint in his studio the next day because I wanted to see Timbuktu, no doubt driven by this fascination with 'the blue men' long shared in the West. Seydou showed great interest in my project. It so happened that he had married a Tuareg woman from Timbuktu, whose niece had just divorced a soldier from Bamako. The young woman wanted to go back to her family in the North. (…) On the day of her departure, Seydou dropped his niece Aïcha off at Bamako Airport, without introducing me any more than this. I have to say that I was somewhat taken back: Aïcha welet Amoye was no less than Miss Tuareg!

This tall beauty, gentle and timid, became the muse of my work during the next two years that I stayed in Timbuktu. I was welcomed like a family friend in Bariz, the fief and district of the Amoye clan. Aïcha’s brothers and sisters, her cousins and neighbors, were also my models. It was the first and only time in my life that marriage was officially proposed to me! I’ve sometimes regretted declining this proposal on the pretext that as an eternal traveler I’d make a terrible husband. Nor was the argument very solid in the eyes of the Tuaregs, descendants of an endless line of nomad Berbers."

Extract from Carnets de voyage 2, 2000, Éditions Gallimard