WORK / LIVE 干活 Sounkarou Dembélé

Lado is the body of stories handed down from generation to generation in Mali: an oral tradition that keeps alive the customs that preserve peace in the villages. Sounkarou Dembélé went to gather fragments of this memory in Tourogougou and Doufaya, the villages his parents come from.

With the Music and Technology section of the Conservatoire of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, we turned them into a sound installation. From the hollow of a piece of an African guitar, the kori, the tales reach us in snatches as we come closer: secret remedies made from this plant or that snake, the anaconda lurking at the bottom of the lake that can rise as you pass and swallow you whole, the animals to be sacrificed to calm the anger of the biggest snake…

To what time do these stories belong, as they pass through us and outlive us? Knowledge from the depths of time speaks of an anchorage, of the roots that shape us, of the elsewhere we carry within us wherever we go. The work lets us glimpse the swing of hearts between the echoes of the home country and the life still to be built here.