FULL CIRCLE

Full Circle follows Marché Noir Lomé-Paris from West African street markets to Parisian curation, and home to Fondation Donwahi in Abidjan. Fashion rooted in the street and the archive becomes cultural sovereignty.

Marché Noir Lomé-Paris x Fondation Donwahi x Abidjan 2026

Heritage does not travel in silence. It sings, it resists, it endures.

Full Circle is a multimedia project by Wall Kurt tracing the journey of Marché Noir Lomé-Paris, from West African street markets to Parisian curation, and back home to Fondation Donwahi in Abidjan. Founded by Togolese visionary Amah Ayivi, Marché Noir turns what the world discards into durable heritage: patinated work jackets, military surplus, fragments of kente, containers of European dead stock reimagined as investment pieces.

Shot inside a yellow gbaka, the first archive and the original market, the series follows two young women, a worn Miriam Makeba vinyl and a story that folds back on itself. At Fondation Donwahi, Black Super Market brings the pulse of the street into the gallery. The gbaka becomes the prologue, the gallery the homecoming. Among the voices is a descendant of the Donwahi family, carrying her lineage not as institutional weight but as living continuity.

This is not second-hand fashion. African fashion does not borrow from the West. It repatriates and reinvents its own stories.

Includes Hedzranawoe, a thirty-second film set in the gbaka, named after Lomé’s famous second-hand market.

Photography and creative direction: Wall Kurt. Art direction: Amah Ayivi. Production: Kontinuous Power. Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, 2025-2026.

https://vimeo.com/reviews/d1079f47-006b-426f-bce2-324a7d46da2e/videos/1241207551