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Niger


2014-2015

Nuit étoilée à Tiguidit 4, 2015

Aïr desert
Oil on canvas (detail)

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Niger
2014-2015

Agadez

"Agadez, the 'gateway of the desert', an ancestral intersection for Saharan roads taken by caravanning traders, nomad livestock breeders, men of letters and religion."

Abstracts

"Today, queues of enormous, heavily loaded trucks stretch to the fringes of the town, a meeting point of Sahel roads from the south and from the north, roads towards Algeria or Libya. Other populations, deriving from new migratory phenomena, converge along the same axis: in one direction, migrants fleeing conflicts, people exiled by drought or poverty, gather on the paths to the Maghreb, and sometimes Europe, and in the other direction, those turned away from these lands. Songhay was the dominant language in the 19th century, and gradually got mixed up with the Tuaregs’ Tamasheq. Today in Agadez, idioms from the south are spoken (…). For around twenty years, Tebu, Beriberi and Arabic languages from the east and northeast of Niger, Chad and Libya have also been heard.

Finally, we come across the languages of those impromptu travellers who go off and come back, migrants from West and Central Africa, the Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana, up to Lingala from the Democratic Republic of Congo… Agadez is a Babel of the desert, where, paradoxically, a strikingly gentle lifestyle reigns. But we can also make out the jargon of the international expatriates from Frontex – the European Union’s sentry – or the International Organization for Migration. Newcomers who now roam about and make the – entirely antidemocratic – claim of limiting the fundamental right of each and everyone to move about as he pleases."

Extract from Retour à Tombouctou, 2015, Éditions Gallimard

Works

Niger 4157
Agadez, 2015

Niger
Acrylic on paper
49 x 64 cm

Niger 4186
Nuit étoilée à Tiguidit 3, 2014

Air desert, Agadez, Niger
Oil on canvas
152 x 108 cm

Niger 4189
Nuit étoilée à Tiguidit 2, 2014

Air desert, Agadez, Niger
Oil on canvas
152 x 108 cm

Niger 792
Nuit étoilée à Tiguidit 4, 2014

Air desert, Agadez, Niger
Oil on canvas
152 x 108 cm

Niger 794
Nuit étoilée à Tiguidit, 2014

Air desert, Agadez, Niger
Oil on canvas
152 x 108 cm

Niger 796
Tambola, 2014

Agadez, Niger
Oil and photograph on canvas
56 x 40 cm

Niger 798
Championnat national, 2014

Agadez, Niger
Oil on paper
56 x 76 cm

Niger 802
Les chercheurs d'or, 2014

Agadez, Niger
Oil and photograph on canvas
62 x 95 cm

Maps

Niger 782
Proverbes et écritures tifinagh, 2015

Oil on paper
56 x 76 cm

Niger 783
Routes commerciales, transhumances et trafics, 2015

Oil on paper
56 x 76 cm

Making-of

Illustration Making Of
Falaise de Tiguidit 1, 2014

© Bruno Pellarin

Illustration Making Of
Falaise de Tiguidit 2, 2014

© Bruno Pellarin

Illustration Making Of
L'envers du décor, 2014

© Bruno Pellarin

Illustration Making Of
Vent de sable sur l'Aïr, 2014

© Bruno Pellarin

Books

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