© UNESCO/Yves Bergeret
Creating a blue triptych in the Painters House, July 2007.

Koyo, a place for dialogue between two cultures

On a piece of cloth spread out on the floor, a poet is painting the letters of his poem in French. He translates it orally into Toro Tegu for the six Dogon villagers of Koyo, in northern Mali, who work with him. Immediately they trace their graphic characters on the same cloth. The poet and the painters are responding each in his own way to the spirit of the place. The work produced here belongs neither to the French nor the Dogon culture – it opens a new space of dialogue and creation.

It will soon be eight years since Yves Bergeret from France and Hamidou Guindo, Alguima Guindo, Belco Guindo, Yacouba Tamboura, Dembo Guindo and Hama Alabouri Guindo from Mali started working together every year.

A unique experiment in dialogue between two cultures and two art forms is turning space into speech, a place into a poem. But it led to the creation of a school and a museum of a new and different kind.

In the summer of 2000, I arrived alone in the village of Koyo, on the top of a mountain in northern Mali, 1000 kilometres from Bamako. You can only get there on foot, and some climbing is required. About 500 inhabitants. Houses of earth and stone among orange rocks – materially, very poor. Yet here the mountain - simple, epic and so beautiful – speaks. As a poet, I read space, which is the Other’s speech, and I answer. I therefore wrote about this village, perceiving that one lives there only by listening to the spirit of this mineral environment set on the edge of the desert.

I came back often. I learned the village was Dogon, without writing; it is the most active of the easternmost Dogon ethnic groups’ and the only one remaining on top of a mountain. In the plain, Peul and Tuareg nomads are dominant. Up above, in Koyo, I gradually got to know six farmers who painted, on the inner walls of their houses: Hamidou Guindo, Alguima Guindo, Belco Guindo, Yacouba Tamboura, Dembo Guindo and Hama Alabouri Guindo.

When I met them, they had on their walls large checkerboards in ocre, black and white, adorned with a few graphic characters – strange, deep gestures expressing their mineral setting. They cultivate this environment almost bare-handed, in meticulous fashion, in little terraces next to basins of water between the rocks on the summit’s plateau.

Accepted by the village, I suggested to these painters during my third stay that together we should create poem-paintings about the place, on cloth at least the size of sheets or floor coverings; I had already practiced this approach of creation as dialogue in Haiti with carpenter-painters and in Senegal with painters of pirogues.

We took one step at a time. Gradually I learned the village language, Toro Tegu. Little by little the traditional chief, the elders and the painters showed me around their mountain, even the remote and secret places. They taught me certain rites to approach these places.
They imparted some myths and the powers of certain ancestors. Yes, after my 20th working visit, I can say the place where they live is the place of intelligence, of initiatory knowledge and of a vigilant kind of ethics. The space is words in action. The place is a poem. Certain women elders in the village, during an occasional night ceremony, sing and dance the reminders and the reactivation of the founding words for the entire community.

We now proceed as follows. The painters are 30 to 50 years old, I am somewhat their elder. As traditional chief, Alabouri Guindo, who is the same age as I am, always comes with us. First we walk on the mountain for a long time, to encounter the visible and the invisible. Then the painters derive the theme we will work on together from our day of walking. On the cloth spread on the ground outside, I paint the letters of the poem I compose. With the participation of the village chief, I translate the poem. Immediately the painters paint their graphic figures on the same cloth. Then, as they put it, they “read me what they have written” and ask me to note it.

This is our dialogue of creation: a poet who reads space and animistic farmers inventing graphic designs to express the same thing, in tandem.

In the work, each one’s thought has its place. Each writes according to his graphic method. The work is a third entity, never exclusively in their world or mine. Powerfully modern. Together we pay intense attention to the human and sacred beauty of the place. And, what amounts almost to the same thing on this mountain, we also pay intense attention to the ethics of speaking and listening. We create a work that makes visible and transmits oral heritage, which is thereby strongly reactivated, and produces active poetic speech.

In the same process we also create our poem-paintings on stones that we raise and leave where they are, to guard the village, the ancestors and the spirits.

Renting the works on cloth (and a few on paper) to galleries (like the Museo nazionale Pigorini in Rome, for one) funds their production and the development project defined by the village. In 2000 the village was struggling to survive on top of the mountain; desertification and poverty drove people to descend and no doubt adapt to the plain. But our dialogue of creation simultaneously reactivated heritage and made it possible to install water reservoirs, a health worker, a school for 50 children in a single class, etc.

In 2006, we built a “Painters’ House” at a short distance from the village, because visitors and tourists are starting to show up. The uninhabited house fruitfully and vigilantly channels curiosities.

The pride of the whole village, the house’s interior walls bear the vast and complex designs of the painters, my companions in creation, and express in a very dynamic modern medium the deep thought and beauty of the place. These are enlivened by the encounter between oral heritage and the poet who writes; all of these paintings talk about the fecundity and permanence of speech.

In 2007, very actively involved in creation and transmission, the painters and I founded five more “Painters’ Houses” on the plain at the foot of the mountain. The village welcomes visitors, but keeps its distance.

Yves Bergeret, French poet

With this article, the UNESCO Courier joins in the celebration of World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development (21 May)


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Photo 2: © UNESCO/Yves Bergeret
The painters and the poet are mounting an exhibit in the open air, Koyo.

Photo 3: © UNESCO/Yves Bergeret
The poet and the painters responding their own way to the spirit of the place.