Romuald Hazoumè (born 1962, Porto-Novo, Benin) began his artistic training unintentionally. Between the ages of 10 and 12, he made masks as part of a Kaléta group.² Kaléta is a tradition mainly carried out by children that was imported to the Republic of Benin in the mid-19th century by former Afro-Brazilian slaves who returned to Africa and settled in Benin. Group members perform during popular celebrations such as Christmas and New Year’s. Kaléta places a strong emphasis on playfulness and scenic art, typically comprising singers, musicians, dancers, and mask-makers. Unlike most traditional Beninese masks, which are made from wood, Kaléta masks are made from discarded everyday objects or materials, such as plastic jerrycans or cardboard, making them more varied in shape and color and often more visually flamboyant. When I interviewed Hazoumè in the spring of 2025, he reminisced about making Kaléta masks as a youth, unaware that this process would lead him to become a renowned artist.³

Hazoumè’s special connection to masks comes not only from his engagement with the Kaléta tradition as a child but also from his Yoruba heritage, specifically as it relates to being a descendant of Lali Alomavo, who was a Babalawo (Voodoo high priest) and advisor to King Dê-Sodji (r. 1848–64) of Hogbonou (now Porto-Novo). Yorubas use masks in various rituals and cults, for example, the Gélédé, a ceremony that pays tribute to Iyà Nlà, the Great Mother, and to the role of women in Yoruba society. On this occasion, the men don masks, dance, and sing, sometimes playing satirical or parodic games, to entertain and honor the women.

Heir to these legacies, Hazoumè posits his artworks, whether created individually or collaboratively, as celebratory and commemorative objects through which he can address a range of topics. The artist prefers to use plastic for their fabrication, rather than the wood favored by the Yoruba, as it is more malleable and lends itself readily to various formal and conceptual experimentations.⁴ Since the 1980s, he has collected plastic gasoline jerrycans used by smugglers along the border separating Benin and Nigeria, which he recycles and transforms into mask sculptures, thus creating works that evoke both contemporary geopolitical and economic issues and local tradition. These containers, the same ones that he has used since childhood, remain his go-to material. For him, the geometric forms of traditional African masks are visible in the shapes of gasoline cans and other everyday objects, which he cuts and remakes into what he calls “masque-bidons” or “mask-cans.” In this way, tradition is never too far removed and can be illustrated using nontraditional materials. Hazoumè’s masks are, in effect, “traditional” ready-mades.

In Yoruba culture, each mask has a cultural, social, and spiritual personality. Hazoumè builds on this concept to craft sculptures that serve as documentary portraits. For example, he created a notable piece titled Bororo du Niger in 1992 after meeting a Bororo/Wodaabe man (fig. 1). This artwork features a face of a Wodaabe male adorned in the makeup and jewelry associated with the annual Gerewol festival, a beauty contest in which young men decorate themselves and perform the Yaake, a ritual dance to seduce young women eligible for marriage. Another example of Hazoumè’s documentary masks is Aloda from 1996 (fig. 2). During the period he created this piece, Hazoumè was researching Yoruba women’s matrimonial hairstyles, a coded language that functions as a kind of social identity card. In the precolonial era, a woman’s hairstyle commonly indicated whether she was single, of marriageable age, married, unfaithful, or experiencing issues in her household. The Aloda hairstyle represented in this portrait, with its cornrows covering the entire skull, leaving the top of the forehead clear, suggests that the married woman is at peace in her home. While some artworks dwell on ancestral forms and ritual, others—like Petite from 1999 (fig. 3)—take their cue from modern life and the artist’s personal encounters. Indeed, he conceived of Petite, which he composed using a typewriter and a cleaning brush, as a tribute to a secretary he had met in Cuba. He was struck by her low wage of just $6 a day, especially considering he had just spent $110 in a single day.⁵

By using discarded everyday objects, especially those made of plastic, Hazoumè critiques the trivialization of the African mask form since the frenzy that emerged in the West in the early 20th century when Westerners first saw the traditional African sculptures and masks brought back from the African colonies by soldiers, missionaries, scientists, and merchants.⁶ Their presence in the West, and particularly their display in museums, has given them new ethnological and artistic value, distancing them in some ways from their original ritual and cultural significance in Africa. These newly discovered forms captivated Westerners, particularly artists and collectors, and led to their increasing popularity. This growing interest also led to a rise in the trade of counterfeit objects, which persists to this day. As descendants of the Beninese mask tradition, Hazoumè’s works reflect on this frenzy for and ensuing trivialization of the African mask shape through a sarcastic touch that dilutes tradition by using humble materials from consumerist society.

Classical African arts, particularly masks and statues, have been a significant topic of discussion in the relationship between the West and Africa since the 20th century. Does displaying traditional African pieces in Western museums compromise their original nature? Should these works even be housed in Western collections?⁷ Sub-Saharan African visual artists of the 1960s were not concerned with addressing this subject directly, as they were primarily focused on pursuing modernity through new forms. This pursuit was often achieved through a distancing from traditional African sculpture, as seen in the work of Aina Onabolu (born Nigeria, 1882–1963) or Iba Ndiaye (French, born Senegal, 1928–2008). Alternatively, some artists, like Christian Lattier (born Ivory Coast, 1925–1978), and art movements such as the Zaria Art Society (1958–1962) or the Dakar School (1960s–1970s), have sought to integrate or reinvent traditional African art forms. However, this work seldom directly criticizes the Western world’s relationship with classical African art.

Romuald Hazoumè was one of the first contemporary artists on the African continent to work on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masks.⁸ Deeply rooted in his Yoruba culture, Hazoumè considers himself to be a present-day aré. In the days of the Yoruba kingdoms, the arés were itinerant artists appointed to create art for the royal court who spread their knowledge and culture from kingdom to kingdom. Hazoumè claims to uphold this tradition by spreading his artistic vision across localities where his assembled masks initiate larger debates.

The assemblage of mask-cans is the artist’s favorite technique for installations, allowing him to layer his work with meaning. Displayed together, the mask-cans unite their voices and personalities to convey multiple threads. His mask-cans converge, for example, different temporalities and symbolize the irreducible link between individuals and their history. Indeed, the plastic gasoline containers recovered and transformed into masks by Romuald Hazoumè bear traces of the memories of the individuals who owned them, featured in the touches of blue, red, yellow, white, or green paint on their surface. In Benin, transporters and sellers of smuggled gasoline use distinctive marks not only to identify themselves among each other while trading with Nigeria but also to protect themselves, since the transport of gasoline is a dangerous business. According to the artist, the color refers to the consciousness or unconsciousness of the Beninese individual, which is attached to the Voodoo religion. Indeed, as he explains: “During their childhood at home, the fuel transporters experienced Voodoo ceremonies in their backyards before converting to Christianity or Islam. Growing up in that environment, they learned that, for example, red could be a protective color. Each person thus adopts the cult color that is personal to them at home.”⁹ Red refers to the Voodoo cult of Shango, the god of justice, lightning, and thunder; blue to the cult of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea; yellow to the cult of Elegba, the god of encounters and an intermediary between other Voodoos; white to the cult of Damballah, the god of fecundity; or green to the cult of Oduduwa, the creator god. Thus, these mask-cans, through color, represent, for the artist, the faces of the individuals who once carried them. Their assemblage in installations enables the artist to tackle a variety of societal discourses.

For example, in 1997, Hazoumè created his first well-known large-scale installation, La Bouche du roi (fig. 4).¹⁰ Held by the British Museum, this multimedia work is a tribute to the memory of slavery and the transatlantic trade that took place from the 17th to the 19th century between Dahomey, the Americas, and Europe.¹¹ The mask-cans attached to the conscious or unconscious mind of their previous owners illustrate here the difficulty of obscuring the memory of slavery, as it is a deep-rooted history shared by African, European, and American people alike. Hazoumè’s artwork is a life-size representation of a slave ship containing 304 African slaves—each represented by a mask-can—who are crammed together in the ship’s hold. The artist based his reconstruction on the 1789 plans of the Brookes, a renowned British slave ship.¹² At the front of the ship, two masks are arranged, set apart from the rest of the group by a rifle, emphasizing the violence associated with the trade. They represent the characters of Chacha de Souza (in yellow) and the king of the Kingdom of Dahomey, Adandozan (1797–1818), and/or his brother Ghézo (1818–1858; in black), upon whom he depended. Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849) was a major slave trader and the chacha, chief under the authority of the Dahomean king of the town of Ouidah, the hub of the Dahomean slave trade. Together, the king and the chacha were responsible for the slave trade: the king captured the slaves, while the chacha sold them to the Europeans. Both were responsible for transporting slaves to the Americas, and as a result, held the captain’s position at the bow of the ship La Bouche du roi. Through his installation, Hazoumè confronts this chapter in Beninese history. According to the artist, taking responsibility in the present for the future means understanding both culture and the past, however hard it may be.

Even if it tackles a historical subject, La Bouche du roi bears contemporary resonances as it evokes the smuggling of raw materials and goods as well as modern-day forms of forced labor. Looking at his work in the present time, Hazoumè connects it to the current treatment of sub-Saharan migrants in Libya or that of South Asian workers in the Gulf countries, even though he had not yet considered those issues in 1997.¹³

In later works, such as Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (2013), the artist chose to address poor governance in modern nation-states. Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (fig. 5) depicts a pirogue sinking into a sea of mask-cans. On the boat’s deck, a white rat symbolizes the figure of the immoral ruler. The rat wears blinding dark glasses and is seemingly unaware of the disaster unfolding below. The work is a sarcastic political critique of the inaction of certain heads of state, especially dictators, regarding the issues that affect their citizens’ lives.

A more recent work, ASÈ (2024), created as part of Everything Precious Is Fragile, the first Republic of Benin pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, encapsulates the multiple threads in Hazoumè’s practice.¹⁴ This work is built with 540 plastic gasoline jerrycans to form a more than 13-foot-high hut with two opposing entrances (fig. 6). Smoothed on the outside using a process of plastic melting, the structure appears to have been built from raw earth, reminiscent of traditional architecture in Benin. Inside, the hundreds of colored mask-cans encircle and immerse the visitor in a meditative penumbra, barely illuminated by only a few beams of light (fig. 7). ASÈ was conceived as a sacred temple, reflecting the strong imprint of Voodoo religion on Beninese culture. During colonization, Voodoo was fought by Christian missionaries, and then it was banned by the Marxist regime of President Mathieu Kérékou in the 1970s.¹⁵ Despite these attempts throughout time and history, Voodoo has remained a part of Beninese culture. The artist thought of ASÈ as a space in which, upon entering, visitors could meditate, make a vow, and say “ASÈ,” which in Yoruba means “amen” and “so be it” but also “power.” The mask-cans functioned here as signifiers of the psychological connection between individuals and the Voodoo religion.

According to Hazoumè, there is power in returning to one’s history and culture, and ASÈ is his first installation entirely dedicated to traditional Beninese culture and speaks for it, fully embracing heritage as “a contemporary solution.” As the artist noted in 2024: “Today, our biggest problem as Africans is that we look at Europe, and we want to do what Europe does. But we can embrace our culture and be ourselves. When you talk about your own culture, you have a place in the world, which is not the case when you talk about someone else’s culture. Today we have to look at home.”¹⁶

A looping recorded recitation of a panegyric praising Tassin Hangbé, the warrior queen who ruled the Kingdom of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin, from 1708 to 1711, highlights the significance of women’s role and power in Beninese society. Tassin Hangbé is recognized for having created the Amazons, also known as the Agodjé, an all-female military regiment that remained active until the end of the 19th century, when Dahomey was colonized. Through the Queen’s tale, the artwork presents an ode to women, echoing the Yoruba idiom “Iya Alachê” or “Iya ASÈ,” that is, “The woman has power.”

Romuald Hazoumè is an heir to the Beninese and Yoruba mask traditions, embracing both continuity and transformation. His work, which illustrates and critiques various historical and contemporary themes, is often also infused with a sense of humor or parody, drawing from the legacy of the Kaléta or Gélédé. In Hazoumè’s art, tradition and memory are not only preserved but also reimagined through everyday objects. By doing so, the Beninese artist positions himself as a guardian of memory and an actor in the formation of a new consciousness.

The post From Mask to Mask-Cans: Reflections on Heritage and Modernity in Romuald Hazoumè’s Work appeared first on post.

Her pottery’s forms and stylistic motifs were derived from Gbari culture and shared among women of her indigenous group (fig. 1). Kwali would go on to make hundreds of waterpots and other thrown wares featuring varied geometric and figurative designs inspired by nature, including animals and plants. This was a way for the artist to intentionally incorporate the Gbari design vernacular in earthenware and stoneware as she developed as a potter. The distinctive blend of traditional Indigenous Gbari pottery and British studio pottery represents Ladi Kwali’s shift from a local ceramist to an international one. This transition—influenced by cultural exchanges occurring in Nigeria when the country was still under British colonial rule—tainted the project with uneven power dynamics that, though problematic, shaped and defined Ladi Kwali’s global acclaim.

In a photograph of Ladi Kwali taken during a pottery demonstration in England in the 1970s by William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay), the most active collector of British studio pottery at the time, Ladi Kwali is elegantly dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, brown patterned wrapper, earrings, and a brown silk head tie (fig. 2). Captured deep in concentration, she is shown incising a waterpot. Kwali was known for her fashion sense, a blend of traditional and Western styles of dress, mainly via the many demonstrations she carried out while touring Europe and the United States in 1962 and 1972, respectively.⁴ Kwali’s choice in clothing belies the physicality of her work, which required that she thrust her fist into a giant ball of clay and then, while circling it, stretch up what would become the wall of the pot with a scraper. She would go on to build the upper half with thick coils, paddle the whole vessel into shape, smooth and decorate it with roller patterns, and finally, incise it with Gbari figures of different creatures.

At the time of this photo, Kwali was in her late forties and had honed her craft in the Gbari tradition of hand-built pottery. Having demonstrated remarkable mastery, she had gained not only national acclaim but also international recognition for her work.⁵ Her precision and steady hand in using sharp blade-like tools to inscribe the clay resulted in the distinct lines visible on the vessel’s surface. In an interview, British Kenyan ceramist Magdalene A. N. Odundo (born 1950) reminisced about Kwali’s attention to detail, stating: “Oh boy, it was amazing. She would point out the mistakes I had made. It was her eye that had the ability to see, form, and correct it. She had a sense of geometry in her bones.” Odundo recounted that Ladi Kwali would “dance” around her pot as she raised and smoothed it, singing in pleasure at her success.⁶ Odundo had previously recalled meeting Kwali in 1974, when the younger potter began working at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre (now in Suleja). Odundo was introduced to Kwali by Michael Cardew (1901–1983), the center’s founder and a pioneer of the British studio pottery movement widely credited for reviving the slipware tradition in England, whom she had met while a student in Farnham that same year.⁷ This experience profoundly shaped her path and solidified her decision to pursue a career in pottery.

Ladi Kwali was heavily tattooed with symbols, and as Ismay’s photograph records, her name was prominently marked on her inner left arm, where the words “Akou Mista Dase, Ladi Kwali” are visible. In this iconic image, she firmly secures the pot by its rim with her left hand while making an incision down its wide belly with her right. Geometric horizontal bands are visible on the neck of the vessel. In his report titled Ladi Kwali: Nigeria’s Potter Extraordinary, which he prepared for the board of trustees of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, C. O. Adepegba proposes that Kwali’s tattoos are an extension of the decorative motifs that adorn Gbari pottery wares: “Since Ladi Kwali had tattoos of geometric figures on her body, it is easy to identify body markings among the Gbari as the only source of her geometric designs.”⁸ The report also cites observations made by historians Sarah Riddick and Clara Hieronymus that reference geometric-patterned tattoos, notably those on the backs of Gbari women and echoed in the designs on decorative pottery and, in varied form, on calabashes, wood carvings, and leatherwork in Kwali town and other parts of Nigeria. One could also speculate that Kwali’s tattoos and pottery designs reflect her deep engagement with folkloric and cultural symbolism and with the natural world and animals.

Kwali used the direct-pull method, which involves hand-building a waterpot directly from a lump of clay, to create pots like the one shown in Ismay’s photograph. This method enabled her to form a short, plump-bellied vessel with a narrow, flared-lip neck. To make taller vessels of different shapes, she used a makeshift rounded disk to create a small pot, which she then enlarged by adding clay coils. As she built up the body of the piece, she circled it clockwise and then counterclockwise, walking steadily backward while dragging one foot to maintain balance—a technique widely practiced by potters undertaking hand-building because it helps to prevent dizziness.

Ladi Kwali first encountered Michael Cardew in 1954, a few years after he arrived in Nigeria to take up his appointment as a senior potter officer employed by the Nigerian colonial government. Cardew researched Nigerian pottery traditions, touring the country and making extensive notes about methods, techniques, clay bodies, and mineral deposits for glazing. He chose a site in the Emirate of Abuja (now Suleja) for his Pottery Training Centre (PTC), a small-scale workshop intended to train boys and men to be potters by introducing them to modern techniques that would enable them to make wheel-thrown, glazed tableware (figs. 3, 4).

It is noteworthy that Cardew’s biographer, Tanya Harrod; scholar Lisa Bagley; and curator and scholar Susan Mullin Vogel have raised issues surrounding Cardew’s engagement in Nigeria. Bagley takes Cardew and his role to task, describing him as “at the intersection of Africa and the West in ceramics where he could act as a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.”⁹ Vogel and Harrod remark on the distinct separation and lack of engagement between Cardew and academic art movements in Nigeria, notably that of the Zaria Art Society, which was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Its members, known as the Zaria Rebels, promoted “natural synthesis,” a concept conceived of and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke.¹⁰ Natural synthesis called for merging the best of Western and Nigerian traditions. However, in Vogel’s view, many of the artists associated with the Zaria viewed Abuja pottery as old-fashioned and ethnographic.¹¹ Harrod saw Cardew’s position as paradoxical—that of a modernist who disliked modernity and a colonial servant who despised the British Empire yet no doubt benefited from the privilege enabled by colonialism.¹²

Cardew first saw Ladi Kwali’s pots on a customary visit to the palace of the emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, who had several of her pots in his personal collection.¹³ Though Cardew’s initial plan was for a male-only pottery enterprise, he reconsidered this take after encountering Kwali’s pottery. With the encouragement of the emir, he accepted Ladi Kwali as a trainee and the center’s first female potter in 1954.

At the time of its establishment in the 1950s and mainly through to the 1970s, the PTC gained a reputation in England and internationally due to Cardew’s influence as an established British studio potter. He organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1958, 1959, and 1962, which proved pivotal to the recognition of Kwali’s internationalism as Cardew’s connection and the interest garnered from his Abuja pottery project led the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to acquire one of her waterpots and some of her thrown wares. The waterpot, the first work by Kwali to be institutionally collected, is on permanent display in the Timothy Sainsbury Gallery, which houses part of the V&A’s ceramics collection.

Kwali’s success opened the door to other Gbari women potters, including Halima Audu, who joined the PTC in 1960 (but tragically died the following year). Asibi Ido joined in 1962, followed by Kande Ushafa and Lami Toto, both of whom arrived a year later, in 1963, and were active at the center until around the late 1970s. These women continued the legacy of Kwali and Gbari hand-building after Ladi Kwali’s passing in 1984. The potters were accustomed to pit-fired pottery, but Cardew introduced them to wheel-thrown, high-temperature, kiln-fired and glazed stoneware, which previously was assigned only to male trainees. As Susan Mullin Vogel has noted, “Kiln firing was an exclusively male occupation, while open bonfire was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it had a meager failure rate.” While the techniques used by women “have been characterized as technically simple,” Vogel points out that this method requires a hyper-refined combination of a specific clay body, fuel, and firing technique as well as certain atmospheric conditions—a formula derived from local experimentation mainly by generations of women, in other words, through regional and Indigenous know-how.¹⁴

Kwali created both hand-built vessels and thrown wares following Cardew’s method, but it was Cardew’s suggestion that she glaze her traditional Gbari-style waterpots with Chun or tenmoku high-temperature glazes (fig. 5), a finish never before used by Gbari potters.¹⁵ This hybridization transformed her pots from functional vessels to celebrated decorative art objects. As the scholar Emman Okunna observes: “This transition from tradition to modernity was a significant turning point in Ladi Kwali’s life and ceramic art practice. It marked an essential interface between the two domains in this iconic personality’s historical art experience. Ladi Kwali now saw herself in an entirely new domain, a testament to her adaptability and innovation.”¹⁶ Even so—and though she was the PTC’s star potter—Kwali earned less than her male counterparts, as educational qualifications determined wages, and she had received no formal education. This discrepancy reflected the wage structure imposed on the center by the Nigerian colonial government, which determined and enforced salary bands.¹⁷

Kwali’s adaptability, innovation, and agency, as Okunna observes, are evident in a portrait by Doig Simmons taken in 1959 (fig. 6). In Simmons’s black-and-white photograph, Ladi Kwali stands confidently in front of the main kiln, which can be seen at the center. She is dressed in a simple sleeveless sundress and her signature head tie. An unglazed terra-cotta waterpot sits at her feet, indicating that it is on its way to being glazed and then fired in the kiln behind her, a process that was, by then, her usual practice. We see a confident and aware maker standing proudly by her work, one of a series of waterpots adapted from Gbari pot-making tradition. Based on her working methods throughout her career, she clearly approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms but rather through the creative processes she had learned in her village.

The portraits of Kwali discussed in this essay provide a lens for re-reading her agency as an astute, self-assured Gbari woman potter framed but not defined and contained by the colonial structure that brought about her international fame. As Marla C. Berns observes, although women are the primary producers of pottery in Africa, scholars have seldom attributed the creation of archaeologically recovered figurative ceramic sculptures to them. Moreover, the question of authorship regarding these esteemed ceramics has rarely been explored.¹⁸ It is crucial to consider Kwali’s identity as rooted in place and context and in who she was before and after her interactions with Cardew and his Abuja pottery project. In addressing the methodological challenges of confronting object histories, one must consider Kwali’s Gbari identity and agency, which are imbued in the objects she left behind. Additionally, Kwali’s pottery embodies a pivotal moment of transformation and hybridity, merging Indigenous Nigerian ceramic traditions with British studio pottery and modern Western techniques.

In 2007, Kwali and her pots were immortalized on the reverse side of the Nigerian 20-naira bank note. This national tribute goes to show how important the artist is in Nigeria. Yet, just the same, historical accounts of her artistic journey remain scarce in comparison to her stature. Little public information exists about Kwali’s later years, and no known recorded or printed interviews document her experiences in Suleja and beyond. Her presence within Nigerian Modernism remains paradoxical—both absent and present—primarily overlooked by intellectuals of the period, who were no doubt aware of her. Still, it is peculiar that she is not cited as an influence given the overlapping period. Kwali’s works resonate with concepts of natural synthesis put forward by members of the Zaria Art Society, calling for the merging of the best of Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and artistic ideas into a hybrid art-making practice and conceptual framework. Ceramist and scholar Professor Ozioma Onuzulike has argued for recognition of Kwali and other workshop-trained Indigenous female potters who used natural synthesis to achieve works that have contributed to the discourse on African modernism.¹⁹ This marginalization was arguably shaped by Cardew’s deliberate detachment from the broader Nigerian artistic discourse and the fact that his pottery project upheld a colonial vision.

My recent trip to Kwali, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Suleja in northern Nigeria to speak to Kwali’s surviving family members raised more questions than answers about how she is remembered. Only a few photographs of the artist and press clippings about her remain in her family archive (fig. 7). Public sculptures, street signs, and even a convention center named after her exist. However, aside from these visible civic and public markers, the most poignant reminders are the anecdotes. There are oral histories recounting stories of visitors from far and wide whom she welcomed into her home and of the critical support she provided to her family members during her lifetime. Additionally, Kwali’s descendants in Suleja hope that one day, her home will be transformed into a heritage site where visitors from around the world can once again come to learn about her(fig. 8). Kwali’s legacy—especially her waterpots—is rooted in everyday life. Easily recognizable as containers, carriers, and vessels that once simply held water, they nonetheless carry memories of an incredible potter whose work continues to transcend space and time. Ladi Dosei Kwali’s pots remain testaments to her personal story and its connection to town and country.

The post Pots, Mastery, and the Enduring Legacy of Ladi Dosei Kwali  appeared first on post.

“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016.¹ She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art scene (fig. 1). As Mbaye stresses, Seyni Awa Camara (Senegalese, born c. 1945) could easily have been excluded from the history of art built in the aftermath of independence in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s patronage and with state support, when artists were trained at the Dakar “école des arts,” mostly as painters. Except for Younousse Seye (Senegalese, born 1940), no women participated in the exhibitions organized to promote national Senegalese art. Younousse Seye was the only woman to display in Dakar (solo exhibition, Théâtre Daniel Sorano, 1977), Algiers (Pan-African Festival, 1969), and Paris (Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 1974). And contrary to most men, she did not benefit from academic training; she learned from her mother who worked as a batik dyer. Camara also inherited her skills from her mother, who was a potter in Casamance (Senegal). Both artists grounded their practices in family knowledge and later developed in more personal directions. Camara certainly gained more attention than Seye over time, especially outside of Senegal. At the turn of the 1990s, her bold statues were displayed in Paris (Magiciens de la terre, 1989), Las Palmas (Africa Hoy, Africa Now, 1992), and Venice (Biennale Arte 2001—Plateau dell’Umanità, 2001). They are now part of important collections such as the National Museum of Art (Oslo), the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar (see fig. 4), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), as well as held in many private collections, some of which are in Senegal (Jom in Dakar and the Musée Khelcom in Saly Portudal). If her creations have stood the test of time, they have also crystallized many of the binary opposites that still structure the art world’s expectations, such as art and craft or the collective and the singular, or the caution deemed necessary by the West in validating any artistic process developed in the so-called peripheries. Looking at the history of global contemporary art from the perspective of Camara’s work and career reveals the ways in which globalization operates, especially regarding women artists from Africa.

Seyni Awa Camara’s figures are striking, and yet they are not meant to please or seduce. They stand free, strongly anchored by their feet, and are sometimes double-headed. With their large smiles, their visible teeth, and their bulging eyes, they often look provocatively happy. Their size varies from a few inches to several yards high, but they are always frontal and hieratic; they are sometimes covered with smaller figures, who cling to their torsos and legs (fig. 2).

When Camara started making these sculptures in her village in Bignona (Casamance, Senegal), people were scared; she could not show them publicly. Michèle Odeyé-Finzi recalls that when she met the artist in the early 1980s, Camara was selling utilitarian pots in the local market.² She was keeping her personal sculptures at her home outside the village in a special room that she had dedicated to them. There, statuettes ranging from maternity figures to zoomorphic ones, small frogs juxtaposed with large cats, trucks, or monkeys (fig. 3), covered the floor. They were made of clay of various shades depending on how they were fired, which is less the case today.

Mystery and rumor surrounded her activities and continue to do so: some wonder if she is still alive and if it is she or rather a sibling who is making the sculptures sold today. A triplet, she was about twelve years old when she disappeared into the forest with her two brothers. As the story goes, they stayed hidden for about four months and geniuses protected them and taught them how to model clay. When the three children finally returned to the village, one of them (Allassane) was carrying a sculpture that he said the forest geniuses had taught him to make. Camara told anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi that all three of them had been initiated into art by mystical forces—a story that perfectly fit the expectations of the West. It only needed to be relayed by the art world to become magical, which happened in Paris in 1989 at the Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World) exhibition.

A lot has been said and written about Magiciens de la Terre as it betrayed many of the hopes it had raised of being the first truly inclusive and international exhibition. According to the Centre Pompidou, which mounted the show, one hundred artists from all over the world were represented in the French capital: fifty from the West and fifty from “the rest” or “non-Western countries.”³ This Eurocentric division was reinforced by the selection criteria: the works of artists from Asia, South America, and Africa were the result of religious, rural, or mystical practices, while those from Europe and the United States were technological, conceptual, and often self-reflexive in nature. Global modernisms were excluded as curator Jean-Hubert Martin feared they would be considered mere copies of Western styles.⁴ The “Picasso syndrome” theorized by Partha Mitter for Indian artists easily applies to any artist from the Global South, and instead of presenting artists who questioned modernism from different perspectives (such as those affiliated with the Dakar School or Laboratoire Agit’Art in Senegal), Martin and co-curator André Magnin chose artists whose work implicitly reenacts the opposition between the “primitive” and the “modern.” This dual approach revived the primitivistic fashion that took place in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant-gardes drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, hence contributing to their paradoxical integration into the Western canon.⁵ The “problem” with this exhibition was not the art or the artists, but rather the burden of representativity it imposed on the artists as their art was led to incarnate one part of the world in comparison or contrast with another.

Still unknown within the contemporary art scene, Camara’s statues were exhibited next to those of Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), one of the few “great women artists” at the time, to quote art historian Linda Nochlin.⁶ Bourgeois served as symbolic validation for Camara, a gesture that was reiterated in 1996 when Bourgeois was invited to write about Camara for a book titled Contemporary Art of Africa: “I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of ‘beauty’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara.”⁷ Camara always considered herself an artist even though she lacked academic training (in the 1980s in Senegal, only 30 percent of girls went to school, and 93 percent of those attending art school were men⁸). “She enjoyed or missed the privilege of going to art school (a blessing in disguise),” continued Bourgeois. “But there need be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in style.”⁹

Camara started making sculptures when she was six years old. She learned from her mother and used to hide zoomorphic figurines in the burning oven among the pots and amphoras her mother was making to be sold at the local market. At the age of fifteen, she was forced to marry a much older man and stopped creating. Though she was pregnant four times, she never gave birth; moreover, she fell seriously ill and had to undergo several operations. Like too many women in Senegal and around the world who are forced to marry at too early an age, Camara had to fight. She came back to art when she left her husband and found in sculpture a way to survive and rebuild herself. Her creations are testament to the power of a woman who not only persisted in a practice many considered strange or marginal, but also was able to make sense of it. She fashioned a unique style and, in the process, built herself a home and secured stable sustenance for her family.

Drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Camara has been prolific and consistent, often dedicating her efforts to pregnant figures and expressions of the maternal. In 1989, for instance, she showed a series of feminine statues covered with small smiling figures that seemed to be budding from them. The energy and power of this work results from accumulation, from the repetition of motifs that creates a tension and challenges any easy apprehension of their meaning. Faces suddenly appear on a belly or the knees, radiating like a sun. Camara’s anonymous characters wear jewelry, they have scarifications and elaborate hairstyles. They command our attention with their round eyes, but yet repel us with their silent, empty stares.

Camara believes these figures can heal both herself and others. Indeed, she once cured a couple who could not have children, helping them give birth to twins, as she recalls in Fatou Kandé Senghor’s film Giving Birth.¹⁰Healing takes time, as does the making of sculptures, which in Camara’s case, begins with the fetching of clay from the marigot (swamp) and is followed by the fine grinding of shellfish and the mixing of the two ingredients.

Once the modeling has been completed, the firing stage, which takes place in the open air of the concession yard, begins (fig. 5). As is always the case with ceramics, some pieces break or explode, while others endure the flames and come out just fine. Camara can count on the help of her family and is often shown surrounded by the young men (her second husband’s sons) who work for her, obeying her orders, preparing the pellets she progressively adds to her hollow figures (fig. 8). Though Camara trains those who assist her, she does not intend to pass down her style or her secrets, as she states in Kandé Senghor’s film. Her art is personal, unique; she believes she received a gift from God and that when she dies, her production should stop. 

Camara has been living from her art since the 1990s, but to her great regret, she sells mostly to foreigners. As she recounted in 2006: “People don’t know me in my own country. I survive thanks to foreigners’ orders. They buy my work and then they leave. My own country ignores me. They don’t know who I am.”¹¹ Fortunately, things have changed since then. The Théodore Monod African Art Museum organized a show of her work in 2018 and acquired some of her statues. The Dak’Art biennial included several of her ceramics in the national pavilion the same year, including her in a national survey of art, and her fame continues to grow within the Western art market. 

I wish to thank Francesco Biamonte, Bassam Chaïtou, Michèle Odeyé-Finzi, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Fatou Kandé Senghor for the information and images they so generously shared with me for this essay. 

The post Seyni Awa Camara, The Power of Modeling appeared first on post.

In this essay, Guillermo S. Arsuaga presents a critical examination of architectural modernism through the lens of one of the most renowned examples of modern architecture in Africa: La Pyramide designed by Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). His meticulous study of Olivieri’s unique photographic record of the project, the focus of which is predominantly the construction process, offers a nuanced understanding of modernism, one that transcends traditional architect-centered narratives. Olivieri’s images reveal a compelling emphasis on the integral role of African labor and the network of expertise and materials active in shaping the building, a perspective often overlooked in conventional architectural studies. Arsuaga underscores the significance of recognizing these elements, of viewing architecture not merely as a physical structure but also as a complex confluence of human endeavor, resources, intellect, and societal forces. He argues that such an understanding of modernism, one embracing the pivotal contributions of laborers from the continent, fosters a more nuanced narrative of architectural history. He concludes with a call for further exploration of the roles of these underrepresented agents across diverse architectural projects and contexts as a means of enhancing narratives and understanding of architectural history and modernism.

In February 2023, I visited the residence of Rebecca Olivieri on the banks of the Adige River in Verona and the private archive dedicated to her father, Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri (1931–1998), who significantly shaped Abidjan’s architectural landscape in the nascent independent Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). His most significant work, La Pyramide (The Pyramid), is a highlight of so-called African architectural modernism—the architectural materialization that emerged in diverse forms across the continent as a result of the convergence of modernity’s aspirations and the quest for national identity catalyzed by the wave of African independences in the 1960s and 1970s.

While discourse on African architectural modernism—especially its implications for postcolonial emancipation—has proliferated in the last few years, Olivieri’s private archive offers a unique perspective on La Pyramide.¹Indeed, it foregrounds labor and materiality, sharpening our understanding of modernism’s intricacies and the networks underpinning its manifestation in a newly independent Côte d’Ivoire.²

Olivieri undertook the project of building La Pyramide in 1972, following design commissions for the pavilion, Cote d’Ivoire, at the Japan World Exposition in Osaka in 1970 and the Istituto Tecnico Industriale in Verona in 1966. Located in the heart of Abidjan, in the district of Plateau, La Pyramide was introduced as a departure from the prevalent glass-and-steel constructions imported from Europe that had proven unsuitable in Cote d’Ivoire due to the country’s intense sunlight and need for consistent air conditioning.³In other words, it was looked upon as a form of architectural modernism specific to the Ivorian context.⁴

Commissioned by SOCIPEC, the first fully Ivorian real estate company, and funded by the National Financing Company, the project unfolded over three years, from 1970 to 1973.⁵Initially named “Centre commercial ad Abidjan,” the building quickly earned the affectionate moniker “La Pyramide” among Ivorians due to its pyramidal form.⁶Once finished, the building became a visual landmark. Moreover, within its 234,600 square feet (21,800 square meters), it fulfilled a range of functions associated with modern urban life, including providing office spaces, studios, a restaurant, an exhibition space, an auditorium, a parking area, a nightclub, and a supermarket. La Pyramide’s dominant triangular plan and truncated pyramidal volume, structurally made in reinforced concrete, rises more than two hundred feet (sixty-one meters) and spans fifteen floors (fig. 1).

According to Olivieri, La Pyramide’s distinctive shape, far from a pure geometrical composition, draws from a formal abstraction of precolonial African bird figurines.⁷The interest in anchoring the building in African culture was reinforced in Olivieri’s reference to his conception of La Pyramide as a “large covered market,” in effect a modern reinterpretation of the traditional African market, which served similarly important social and cultural functions.⁸ This endeavor is architecturally evoked in the multilevel central hall, a daylight-infused space and the building’s commercial and social hub (figs. 2 and 3). At the same time, this main hall functioned architecturally as a key organizational space, facilitating access to various levels encompassing offices and commercial areas, all visually connected within the hall (see fig. 3). This space is illuminated by natural light, which, in conjunction with the suspended concrete walkways, contributed to a visibly engaging design. Indeed, Olivieri described these elements as facilitating “evocative” interplays of light and space, a concept inspired by the drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778).⁹

The central hall is perhaps the most architecturally experimental aspect of La Pyramide, in effect reversing the characteristics typical of a building’s core. Traditionally dark and secluded, this space is instead a light-filled, gathering place. It simultaneously offers shelter from sun and rain, drawing inspiration from the dynamic ambiance of traditional covered outdoor markets (see fig. 2, 3 and 13).

The layout of La Pyramide is programmatically articulated, characterized by a stratification of spaces by their intended use. The first twelve floors were designed to contain offices, retail venues, and studios, which are arrayed in a triangular perimeter across suspended walkways that surround the central hall—enhancing its role as a center for social and commercial exchange.

At the heart of the building, on the third floor, an exhibition room appears to be suspended within the central hall. The thirteenth floor, which was dedicated to a restaurant, provides a panoramic view of Abidjan and Ébrié Lagoon, and an auditorium on the fourteenth and fifteenth floors crowns this main volume.

Attached to the pyramidal space, two vertical towers contain the elevators, stairs, and bathrooms—thus freeing up space in the central hall (typically, a tall building would incorporate these infrastructural elements in its core). Above the ground floor, between one of the towers and the main volume, a circular extension that once housed a snack bar cantilevers toward the street. The three-level basement of La Pyramide originally included, top to bottom, a supermarket, a nightclub, and a parking lot.¹⁰

An outstanding architectural feature of the exterior is the aluminum components that Olivieri employed in contrast to what is otherwise raw concrete. Explained as a climatic adaptation, these metal elements wrap horizontally around the facade in the form of brise-soleils that not only shield the glazed side but also the outdoor walkways extending across three sides of ten levels of the building.

The Evolving Modern Legacy of La Pyramide

The initial aims of modernity and La Pyramide have decayed over the years. Once hailed by the architectural press as a significant exemplar of Ivorian architectural emergence, the building now stands in a state of neglect. Since the 1980s, it has remained largely unoccupied and closed to the public, owing to the high costs associated with its maintenance.¹¹Nevertheless, there are ongoing initiatives focused on its repurposing and restoration that give new hope to the revival of the structure.¹²

Amid discussions of the future of La Pyramide, Olivieri’s project archive in Verona, until now largely unexplored, offers a window into not only the intricate ideation and construction of the building but also the role of architecture in mediating the relationships between representation, labor, and materials in an incipient Ivorian nation.

Ascending to the second floor of the palazzo in Verona, one encounters a realm in which Olivieri’s memories and works have been carefully preserved by his daughter, Rebecca. These tangible remnants of the architect’s legacy—photographs, sketches, architectural models, and press clippings—all of which he brought back to Italy upon concluding his professional work in Abidjan, where he moved with his family, spent several years in residence, and acquired Ivorian nationality.¹³Various drawings—watercolors, pencil sketches, and Conté crayon renderings—adorn the walls, each silently attesting to Rinaldo’s drawing proficiency. Yet, within this vast repository, there is an unmistakable absence—there are no drawings or blueprints of La Pyramide, the architect’s most celebrated creation (and the reason for my visit).

Rebecca suggested that most large-size architectural renderings from the 1970s, including those of La Pyramide, might have been challenging to transport from Abidjan, and therefore left behind. As I explored the boxes dedicated to the project, I confirmed the glaring absence of what many architects regard as foundational to architectural documentation: original drawings, which are (to a certain extent) present among the records of Rinaldo’s other projects related to Côte d’Ivoire, such as the Osaka Pavilion and San Pedro Airport city. Rinaldo’s archive for La Pyramide instead sparkles with black-and-white photographs—some showcasing early models, others recording the completed building, and still others making up an extensive series chronicling the construction process. While I browsed these photographs, Rebecca mentioned Rinaldo had shot the images taken on-site himself. Alongside these were a few 11 x 8 1/2–inch photocopies of drawings of La Pyramide and some sketches of the same dimensions—quite different from the drawings an architectural office would traditionally produce.

This revelation is particularly striking against the backdrop of traditional Western narratives of modern architecture, in which the architect is lauded as the singular genius behind innovation and aesthetic excellence. Such accounts are sustained by a reliance on the architectural archives and full-scale drawings commonly thought to preserve the architect’s original intentions and the intellectual interests that inspired them. Yet, the collected artifacts related to La Pyramide lack such “original” or full-scale drawings, typically the cornerstone of an architectural archive, suggesting that there are missing pieces in terms of the building’s architectural history.¹⁴

Upon closer scrutiny of the available material—predominantly construction photographs—I discovered an opportunity to understand the architectural process behind La Pyramidein a new light. I found myself enthralled by the idea that these pictures, in their plentiful number and varied perspectives, provided something significant about Olivieri’s view of the project. This was not just a smattering of images but nearly 150 photographs—some duplicated, some cropped, some refocused, and some reformatted. First, they were taken by the architect himself, making them a direct trace of what he thought was worth recording and of his main preoccupations while engaged in the project. Second, there was a postproduction process within the selection as is evidenced by the cropping and crossing out of images recorded in dozens of contact sheets. And, finally, these photographs—among the presumably many documents Olivieri could have saved to illustrate the project—were the ones he chose to transfer from his studio in Abidjan to his house in Verona. In short, at that point, I realized, most likely for him, these images likely encapsulated for him a more holistic depiction of the project than any one drawing could.

Surveying Olivieri’s photographs of La Pyramide, many of which depict African laborers at work, one is immediately struck by the dual nature of the imagery. On the one hand, this focus can be seen as embodying the colonial viewpoint of a European architect capturing African labor though his own lens. However, on the other, in terms of tracing the history of the building, it unfurls a network of diverse involvements, revealing the intricate meshwork of hands and minds that forged the building’s existence, shedding light on the complex interplay of roles and thereby enriching our architectural discourse. In this sense, Olivieri’s images can be interpreted beyond a binary perspective, one that sees them as either an imperial tool or an instrument of liberation. They are, in fact, tools in illuminating the active roles and perspectives of laborers and other participants in the construction process, in prompting a critical examination while acknowledging the underlying power dynamics and colonial implications.¹⁵

The photographs in the collection provide a rich chronicle of the construction process, including of the site, the materials and techniques employed, and especially the labor engaged throughout the project. Who were these workers? Were they Ivorian locals or brought in from afar? Were they West African migrants? How many hands contributed to this task, and under whose directive? While the photographs housed within the Olivieri archive may not answer all of these questions, they undeniably suggest a more multifaceted understanding of African architectural modernism.

These images invite a shift in perspective—one that steps away from the single authorship of the architect and toward an understanding of a building as the result of a collaborative effort. Rather than perpetuating an architect-centric narrative, this view sees the architect as one part of a broader constellation of contributors within a network encompassing power dynamics and economic, cultural, and social factors, thereby offering a more nuanced architectural history, one that intersects with discourses on labor, materials, colonial legacies, and postcolonial aspirations.

Modern Narratives: Olivieri’s Photographic Chronicle of La Pyramide

That February day in Verona, as I flipped through Olivieri’s images, I saw that they had been chronologically organized, from the foundation excavations to the building’s final rise. Looking at the architect’s numerous images of the foundation, I sensed his fascination with the choreography of laborers, tools, and materials involved in the initial excavation. To be sure, these images reveal less of an abstract void than of a pulsating node of human endeavor. Indeed, later, in a coffee-scented interlude, the late architect’s widow, Isabella, tenderly shared memories of Abidjan.¹⁶Revisiting her first brush with a vast excavation—destined to become the basement of La Pyramide—she reflected on this being the inaugural spectacle Rinaldo had elected to unveil to her upon her arrival to Abidjan.

Within the images of the excavation and setup of the foundation, one image particularly struck me: It depicts a massive cubic void, some sixty feet deep, punctuating the earth, and shows five African laborers at work (fig. 4). Four are in the bottom of the trench, engaged in the fundamental acts of digging and earth removal. Another ascends a ladder, contributing to the emerging verticality that hints at what will become La Pyramide.

In looking at this photograph, I began to discern Olivieri’s active role in shaping the narrative of LaPyramide’s construction. The scale of the excavation is underscored by the individual efforts of the laborers who, using manual means, appear to effortlessly carve the clay-rich soil, which stands vertically, defying the need for support. The framing of the photograph further intensifies this perception, with the void almost five times higher than the workers—beyond the reach of a ladder. However, one can discern the role of heavy machinery by the subtle tire marks visible on the ground. This equipment, I surmise, was consciously excluded from the frame. By choosing to highlight the monumental scale of the carved void alongside intense manual labor, and simultaneously omitting the machinery that typically would be involved, Olivieri, whether consciously or unconsciously, revitalized the role and agency of these laborers within the grand narrative of the building’s construction.

Consider another photograph depicting five laborers assiduously arranging rebar into a sharp hexagonal cast-in-place footing anchored within the soil (fig. 5). Visible in the right-hand side of the image, the concrete truck’s chute stands ready for a pour while its delivery is guided by a handcrafted wooden support system. Yet again, the heavy machinery, both the truck and the mixer, are outside of the frame, focusing the viewer’s attention on the workers themselves and the craftmanship of the pristine geometrical footing.

While construction is inherently collaborative, Olivieri’s emphasis on this expansive agency in his archival record present in these photographs offers an opportunity to highlight the role of African workers. Moreover, it provides a critical lens through which to challenge the oversimplified single-author narrative that has, at times, dominated architectural discourse.

As La Pyramide rose from its foundation, Olivieri’s photographic effort was unwavering, particularly toward the intricate interplay of main structural components imported from Italy and assembled by African craftsmen in Abidjan (see fig. 6 and 7). In his photographic chronicle, he captured the dynamic between industrial-engineered structural elements designed by Riccardo Morandi (1902–1989)—a leading figure in reinforced concrete work in Italy—and their nuanced integration and assembly by local hands.¹⁷ Rather than isolating these construction elements in the manner of detached, abstracted representations of engineering or architectural objects, Olivieri continuously anchored them in relation to the African labor force, rendering this construction history within a broader context. This decision provides a perspective on a long-standing question in the history of architectural modernism: how global designs, networks of materials, and labor relate to the local landscapes and communities in which they are realized.

Take, for instance, the photograph in which Olivieri purposefully captures an African worker meticulously retouching a beam on La Pyramide’s uppermost level (fig. 8). Far from the result of a random snapshot, the composition is orchestrated to mirror the structure of the neighboring pillars and to highlight the laborer’s contribution. Standing tall, he brushes the underside of a ceiling beam, fresh from the removal of the supporting forms and shoring that supported the concrete during curing. Within the scene, a second workman dismantles the shoring on the floor beneath. This picture, set against the panorama of Abidjan’s Ébrié Lagoon and an array of modern residential buildings, suggests that Abidjan is not just in the process of being transformed but already the embodiment of modernity. Once again, whether consciously or unconsciously, Olivieri’s framing juxtaposes the realities of the laborers against the emergence of a modern Abidjan, reiterating the indispensable role of African laborers in shaping this perception.

Beyond the Frame: Reimagining Modernism through La Pyramide

As I delved deeper into the recesses of Olivieri’s archive, a previously overlooked photograph captured my attention. The image showcases a group of African workers ostensibly engrossed in setting up temporary lodgings for La Pyramide’s workforce (fig. 9). Yet it was not their labor that captivated me, but rather the billboard prominently situated in the foreground. Towering at twenty-four feet, it bears the inscription “Centre Commercial SOCIPEC IMOBILIERE,” which is set above a depiction of La Pyramide. Intriguingly, the sign also delineates the diverse entities involved in the construction La Pyramide—architect Rinaldo Olivieri, concrete engineer Ricardo Morandi (who, like Olivieri, hailed from Italy), Sinitra (the Ghanaian construction firm trusted with the majority of the construction), Socotec (a French entity charged with supervision), Fenzi (a Northern Italian firm supplying aluminum and window frames), and Otis (the American titan responsible for the elevators).

I realized this picture captures the core of the power dynamics between various agents and initiatives during the construction of La Pyramide. It renders the dominance of so-called European technical expertise (such as that of Olivieri, Morandi, or Fenzi) juxtaposed with nascent African companies within the new nation-state framework (such as SOCIPEC and Sinitra)—all of which is juxtaposed with the African laborers setting up their temporary settlement.

Discovering multiple iterations of this image in Olivieri’s collection piqued my curiosity. Why had Olivieri repeatedly chosen to photograph this particular scene? Perhaps because it encapsulated the role of La Pyramide within African modernism more effectively than any other—a role defined not by its scale or use of aluminum and concrete, but rather by the dynamic convergence of labor and technical know-how and the African endeavors toward modernity that brought it to life. Concurrently, this construction narrative, coupled with the initial idea behind the building—to reinterpret the rhythms of the traditional marketplace by infusing local commerce with modernist aesthetics and spaces—perhaps evidences the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of architectural African modernism and its contested role in the continent’s time of self-determination and the different experiences and subjectivities, from African workers to European technicians, that it entailed.

This exploration leads to broader contemplation within the field of architectural history, which has often overlooked non-Western geographies such as Africa.¹⁸ An expansive reassessment of modernity that transcends a Western-centric focus demands a reexamination of both the architect’s role and the presumed objectivity of archival materials within the larger narrative of architectural modernism. Far from being an obstacle in the task of writing history, this broader scope offers fertile ground for inquiry within a canon traditionally dominated by Western perspectives. The realms of architectural practice, such as labor, that typically have been marginalized within mainstream discourse provide vital alternative viewpoints, cultural richness, and distinct architectural frameworks that challenge and subvert the dominant Western-centric ideology of the architect’s realm. As a result, both the architect’s contributions and the very shape of architectural archives take on a nuanced complexity, defying simple categorization.

This shift away from monolithic understanding enhances the possibility for a more inclusive reading of architectural history. It offers a fresh view of modernist architecture and underscores the diverse agents who influenced its trajectory. It encourages a broader understanding of a building, one extending beyond aesthetics and construction, to consider it as a reflection of prevailing power structures, aesthetic norms, economic conditions, labor practices, and material uses. A deliberate pivot from the architect as the central figure allows the emergence of the lesser-acknowledged agents often eclipsed in Western narratives. This reorientation invites a more expansive vista of the modern canon, one that welcomes those in previously shadowed roles.

In this sense, Olivieri’s photographs foster an understanding of modernism that extends beyond the physical edifice . They underscore a collective action that interweaves the builders, materials, and users, nurturing an evolving African modernity. This perspective, though it might seem logical at this point, significantly differs from earlier portrayals of the building, such as its depiction in the 1979 MoMA exhibition Transformations in Modern Architecture, in which the building was predominantly presented as a finished object lacking human interaction, and in the L’Architettura magazine article of 1973, which similarly depicts the project.¹⁹