edited by Luigi Fassi

from 9 November 2018 to 3 March 2019

With “Sogno d’oltremare” François-Xavier Gbrè, for the first time in Italy, presents a photographic selection with an African subject, which documents an exploration of the capital cities of West Africa, Abidjan and Bamako, Porto Novo and Dakar together with new series of images created during his stay in Sardinia and commissioned by MAN.

Gbré’s residency in Sardinia, held with the support of Film Commission Sardinia between July and September 2018, covering most of the historical regions of the island, translates within this exhibition into a photographic research composed in the form of a hypothetical epistolary dialogue between an Ivorian citizen residing in Sardinia and someone who remained at home, or perhaps, among those who live in Africa and write to a friend now far away in the European latitudes. The emotional loneliness of geographical displacement, the exploitation of territories, and the relationship between what is classified as the south and what is defined as the north are the themes that emerge from these works. The exhibition aims to bring to light the difficult identity situation in contemporary West Africa, divided between the consequences of the Cold War, the migration of the people and the rise of an economic occupation led by China.

Gbré has developed a diary of photographic notes on the landscapes of the internal territory of the island, following the traces of abandoned buildings, ancient industrial settlements, archaeological sites, abandoned infrastructures and surrounding natural scenarios. The object of investigation, in fact, are civic structures and public architecture (swimming pools, sports stadiums) and historical places such as monuments and decorative elements (murals) observed as futuristic symbols of progress and at the same time places of exclusion and social selection.

The artist’s journey to Sardinia turns into a cultural and social journey following the stratified traces of settlements and memories, overseas identities of the colonial era, victories and defeats.

Also on display is an ancient eighteenth-century geographical map that reveals the image of “another Sardinia” where the usual cartographic codes are unrecognizable. If in Gbré’s images Africa can no longer be distinguished from Europe and Mali from Sardinia it is because the insular Mediterranean world, immersed in a slow layer of history as the historian wrote Fernand Braudel, omits perspectives and submerges the present with the enigma of its own history, between crossings and hybridizations, languages ​​and landscapes, deaths and rebirths. Observed from Africa, the Sardinia that Gbré describes is thus an elusive and elusive universe, in which other cultures, other peoples and other worlds have previously cohabited.

François-Xavier Gbré’s research is a photographic investigation of African modernity, an uninterrupted observation of rural places and urban scenarios that contributes to rethinking the recent history of the continent through an intimate and private instrument of confession.

We thank the bodies that support the MAN’s activity: Sardinia Region, Nuoro Province, Sardinia Foundation.