MALI-BLEU

Mali was one of the strangest and most visually intense places I had ever seen. It was beautiful and harsh at the same time, without separation. Dust, heat, poverty, cloth, ceremony, markets, walls, shadows and human elegance belonged to the same field.

In the early 1990s Mali was listed among the poorest countries in the world, yet living there did not feel like an encounter with poverty alone. Bamako, the capital, felt like a village that had become a city. Sprawling, dusty, chaotic, open at every edge. The city was a market from one end to the other. Small shops, roadside stalls, food, cloth, repairs, bargaining, argument. Everything took place outside. Everything was visible. And if it was not visible, it would be made visible.

Appearance mattered. A well-dressed man might wear metres of cloth, folded and sewn into a broad upper garment with wide, billowing trousers and matching leather slippers. Women moved in equally elaborate cloth, patterned, wrapped and brilliant. Beside this stood the hard edge of the place. Beggars, street children, the lame, the visibly wounded. Beauty and poverty stood side by side in the same dust.

And tea.

The small blue enamel teapot appeared on tiny handmade charcoal stoves, on the road, on the pavement, in the entrance to stalls or shops. Men bent over the fire, fanning it with woven grass fans, brewing tea so strong and sweet it seemed to belong as much to ritual as to thirst. The first glass, the second, the third for the truly hardened. The teapot marked the day. It charted the day. It was an object of ceremony, business, waiting and talk.

For this collection, the teapot became central. I was drawn to it again and again, almost magnetically. This was where things happened. It was the watering hole, the point of gathering, the place where men stood or sat, where words were exchanged, where waiting became part of the rhythm of the street. Through the teapot, I could disappear. Sitting there with these men, I became part of the scene. People no longer stared or looked surprised at the Toubab, the white man, the foreigner. For a short while I could sit at ease and watch life pass by.

The moments were often almost too quick to hold. A figure would appear, dressed in some extraordinary way, caught for a second against a wall, a doorway, a sheet of light, and then the light had changed and the figure was gone. Some I caught there and then. Others returned late at night, or days later, when memory brought them back and I could put them down on paper. The teapot made that possible.
In the paintings, the teapot becomes more than an object. It begins to look like a small blue globe, with handle and spout, held over fire and surrounded by dust. It could almost be a flag. If Mali needed one, I would imagine it pitch black, with an indigo blue teapot edged in fine gold.

Bamako often felt like a stage on which anything could happen. One morning, while trying to cross the main bridge into town, the bridge was closed by a herd of camels, cattle and goats driven by armed Tuareg riders on magnificent horses. Another time, after the government suddenly decided that moped riders had to wear helmets, people answered the order with pots, pans and calabashes on their heads. Absurdity and invention belonged to daily life.

The paintings came out of that pressure. Blue, ochre, cloth, wall, doorway, shadow, dust, figure. The figures appear between heat and memory, between the formality of dress and the uncertainty of the street. The watercolours are immediate and exposed. In the larger Mali-Bleu paintings, memory becomes denser. Blue carries distance, shadow and heat. Ochre carries dust, wall and ground. The paintings hold the place as I experienced it, with intense beauty and intense harshness inseparable.

To Samuel Sidibé, and to those who lived with the Mali paintings

In the early hours of last night, your name returned to me.

Samuel Sidibé.

With it came the National Museum in Bamako, the clay walls, the wooden beams protruding from the surface, the feeling of a building made from the same intelligence as the land around it. And then the exhibition returned too.
I remember one painting in particular, a large view across the Friday gathering towards the mosque, seen from the place of the teapot. I had given it, privately, a very irreverent name. Samuel saw the danger immediately. He smiled, looked at me, and said there might be trouble with that one. Later he came back, still smiling, nudged me, and said we would hang it too.
It felt like two boys getting away with mischief, but mischief that had been understood.
Many of the works from that exhibition went out into the world. I no longer know where they are, or who has them. Some may be in Bamako, some in Europe, some elsewhere. I have very little photographic record left.

This is a small open note. To Samuel, if this reaches you. To anyone who bought or lived with one of those works. To anyone who remembers that exhibition.

I would be grateful to hear where the paintings are now, and to reconnect the scattered pieces of that time.

Adrian Mellon