Gamanké Museum

Gamanké Museum is a multimedia project exploring the place of objects from Sub-Saharan Africa in European societies and their institutions. Supported by the Roger de Conynck Fund, it will reach its final form in April 2025. This project revolves around a collection of “tourist masks”: inexpensive reproductions of traditional masks, primarily sold to a white audience. These objects, though fake, perpetuate a colonial legacy: a commerce that continues to erase historical, cultural, and spiritual narratives. From these masks, I take plaster negative impressions from the backs of the objects, symbolically revealing the face that carries them—or rather, the absence of that face. The photographic component thus presents twelve Gamanké masks, photographed according to the traditional visual codes of sculpture or art photography in Western museums. This treatment, both sensitive and ironic, becomes a means of giving a paradoxical value to these “objects that have died multiple times.” In addition to the photography, a video game offers an immersive fiction around the Gamanké masks. This medium allows me to deconstruct the museum space and imagine an alternative. In the game, visitors interact in an invented language, Dgéba. Inspired by the sounds of Bambara and Sonrhai, this fictional language fills a personal and cultural void while providing a universal experience, avoiding the use of English or French. This project, blending photography, text, and virtual elements, invites us to rethink how we observe, preserve, and interpret these legacies.