Mouvements: Between Tradition and Transformation

Mouvements is a long-term photographic investigation into the ways West African bodies act as living archives sites where memory, labor, and cultural inheritance converge.

The series presents gestures, postures, dances, and daily labor across Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Mali, articulating how bodies carry histories of resistance, adaptation, and continuity. Each image foregrounds the body not as passive subject but as active participant in shaping space, time, and communal knowledge.

The works trace both inherited and transformative practices: postures, movements, and ways of inhabiting the environment reveal what is passed down, what endures, and what is reinvented. By combining portraits, work scenes, and rituals, the series constructs a decolonial visual language that questions conventional representation of African life: these bodies are neither exoticized nor victimized, but complex, resilient, and selfdetermining.

The project insists on the ethical dimension of representation. Photography becomes a medium of accompaniment, observing the transmission of gestures and the embodiment of memory while honoring dignity, collaboration, and temporality. Mouvements ultimately positions West African bodies as agents of both continuity and change, offering a sustained reflection on how communities negotiate tradition, transformation, and futurity