Since 2012, the Univers des Mots project has supported contemporary writing by bringing texts to the stage and promoting contact between artistic projects and audiences.
Every two years, teams of artists from different countries and continents are hosted in residency in Conakry (Guinea). Univers des Mots supports the authors in their writing process and provides the artists with stages and spaces for experimentation.
Authors, directors, actors, dancers, circus artists, performers and scenographers work on stage for three weeks, exploring writing through an approach based on sharing and mutual enrichment. Their various projects are presented at the end of the residency.
In 2017, Bilia Bah (the founder of the Univers des Mots project) invited me to be its art director. The festival has now grown from a simple reading event to an art laboratory hosting some ten multidisciplinary projects.
Before long, due to lack of space, we had to ask the question of where theater could be done. The Franco-Guinean Cultural Center, which generously offered us its premises, was no longer big enough to accommodate all the projects, so we had to start thinking differently, to find other work spaces and invent them if need be.
This is why we invited the scenographers to move into the neighborhoods of Conakry, open other doors and reach out to new, non-theater-going audiences.
In 2017, in the Minière neighborhood we began, hesitantly at first, to center our dramaturgical reflection on the role of scenography.
In 2019 we set up bases in Kaporo and Nongo, two lively Conakry neighborhoods, occupying various spaces: family courtyards, football pitches, villas, youth clubs, garages, business premises... The artists turned them into areas for discussion, poetry, shouting, laughter, reflection, debate and perspiration where artistic gestures intersected with spectators’ daily lives.
What I had in mind by inviting European and African scenographers to work in these Conakry neighborhoods was to propose projects inspired by their experience of a particular place.
With this approach, the space is already present: rather than imposing a scenography on an existing site, the idea is to soak up the place’s potential. So for the duration of their three-week residency, it was up to the various artists to inhabit it, disguise it, shape and modulate it...
With this approach, the artists have to adopt new methods, blending their vision with the natural setting that already exists.
The choice of workspace is decisive. The scenographer plays a central role in deciding which space is best suited to which project. By helping to fit a project to a place rather than writing it from outside, he or she becomes an author of the experience.
When I’m asked, “Why do you hold a festival in Conakry neighborhoods?”
I answer, “To get closer to the people”;
I answer, “To talk to people nobody talks to”;
I answer, “To trigger the unexpected, an unplanned encounter with a random passerby, someone who was just passing through but will take a word, an image, a laugh away with them”;
I answer, “So as not to wait for spectators to come to us but to go to them instead, sparking their curiosity, inviting ourselves into their streets, their homes, their neighbors’ homes, their workplaces, barging into the traffic, disturbing the usual cacophony, attracting a glance, or two, or three, then getting car horns tooting, motorbike-taxis stopping, headlights flaring, then: Who is it? What’s going on? What are they up to?”
What on earth are they up to?
What on earth are they up to?
What on earth are they up to?