Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography Declares Open Name for Functions

Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography introduced the opening of the decision for purposes for it’s fifteenth version which is able to happen in Bamako, Mali, from 26 November 2026 to 26 January 2027.

Founded in 1994, the Bamako Encounters are the main worldwide occasion devoted to modern African pictures. The 2026 version is organized by the Ministry of Handicrafts, Culture, Hotel Industry and Tourism of Mali, beneath the curatorial path of Armelle Dakouo and the final delegation of El Hadj Amadou Diop.

The fifteenth version is constructed across the theme REFABULATION(S), a curatorial proposition inviting artists to discover the narrative energy of pictures and pictures’s means to generate different readings of the world.

The name for purposes is presently open to photographers, filmmakers, visible artists and multidisciplinary creators from Africa, its diaspora and Afro-descendant communities. Selected initiatives can be built-in into the Biennale’s programme and related exhibitions.

Alongside the decision, they’re actively in search of to strengthen collaborations with media organizations, cultural establishments, foundations, worldwide organizations, non-public sector companions {and professional} networks fascinated by modern pictures, visible tradition and African inventive industries.

Curatorial observe
In an age of uncertainty how can we provoke a brand new relationship with a world present process modifications. In his time Chinua Achebe already known as upon the facility of “refabulation” to combat cultural loss, alienation, assimilation. If “fabulation” could be outlined because the invention of “imaginaries” shifting away from actuality, it may also be seen as a type of resistance that distances itself from dominant narratives. The energy of ” refabulation” would then be a story power within the uncertainties surrounding the worldwide scenario.

“Refabulating” paradoxically permits the constructing or creation of latest potentialities. The inventiveness of “refabulations” will increase the capability to supply one other studying of the world, to imagine a essential pondering, to find a distinct view level, to make up for the weaknesses, the absences or the lacks of the dominant narratives. They are an invite prolonged to the artist photographers of the African continent, its diaspora and Afro descendants to handle the problems we’re involved about and that have an effect on us as a way to lengthen the reflection upon the facility of creativeness by means of the inventive drive of plastician pictures.

Photography “refabulates” comparable to litterature or cinema, however another way, by means of the pictures it affords, the strikes it makes, the views it attracts up, the step backwards it achieves. It modifies the methods of seeing and contemplating issues, with or with out phrases. With their capability of unveiling one other picture of our societies the artists plunge into the imaginary to ultimately seize the true. Photography can maintain the multiplicity of narratives, present different routes by reworking our psychological pictures, divert our methods of seeing from their strange course, by reinventing what is meant to be identified and by liberating them from their chains. In this manner ” Refabulations” are matrixes of emancipation.

For their half how do photographers initially seize the narrative energy and refabulation to intervene in their very own approach in lived expertise? In the period of AI do pictures permit us to understand issues in a different way, extra clearly?

By growing an infinite number of potentialities, photographic “refabulations” contribute by their plasticity, by the modification of our perceptions, by the creation of potentialities to the reestablishment of freedom. They revisit and lengthen tales which, for having been actual, weren’t all the time ours. Above all they transcend private fiction and their statements are collective, these lively fictions lead as much as open societies, to infinities of peoples.

– Armelle Dakouo

Photo: Solie Morin.