Travelling Through Time
The Malian photographer Aboubacar Traore understands his work as a political statement. Especially the photos of the red empty chair, which he places in the suburbs of Bamako or at the banks of the River Niger speak about the absence of rulers who serve their country instead of exploiting it. In these pictures Mali’s past communicates with the present.
The theatre director Noël Minoungou from Burkina Faso has taken up Aboubacar Traore’s idea of the red chair and the question of power in his play entitled Mister Time. At the centre of the performance is a physicist who travels into the past with a time machine. But something must have gone wrong with the construction. Because suddenly African and European heads of state from different eras are on stage at the same time, reciting passages from speeches they once held. They all talk about Africa and the hope of finally freeing the continent from the shackles of its colonial past. Mister Time – with the knowledge of the present – reacts disillusioned and melancholic. Many of the visions of those days have not been realized until now.