Martin Errichiello, Tales of the River Lebe, from PRIVATE 51 – Global Report 2, p. 54-57

The cultural essence of Mali, a western African country, reveals herself as a precious alchemy of anthropological roots where more than 20 ethnic groups such as the Bambara from the capital Bamako, the nomadic Peul and Touareg up the mysterious Dogon, coexist in democracy, religious and political. Several characters of a shared identity originated in a common symbolic, materic “history”, which, from the bare stone, protects and defends itself. Exploring the narrative languages of visual anthropology, this tale of a place is conceived as an integration of forms and gestures where the symbols of a material civilization, bodies  and  ‘masks’ are analyzed with the aim of getting to its ‘unity’, by a mimetic composition in polyptychs, thus tracing a passage among the surface signs.  A light is cast upon a certain ‘primary’ human condition with the intent of preserving and defending the thread of common matters and experiences which, raising in a space and thwarting time, transform themselves from witnesses into evidence.

What usually escapes is what really binds: just a man, only his house, the soul of which it’s made.

“If one or more empirical things have certain qualities, this is done according to a report, even temporary and imperfect, that they establish with ideas. This report is the ‘participation’ (methexis) or communication: empirical things ‘involved’ ideas or ‘communicate’ with them. For example, participating in the idea of similarity, sensible things become similar”. (Plato)