Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama wraps London's Barbican in pink and tunics

To cover the facade of this emblematic place of the London art scene with these 2.000 square meters of fabric, it all started with the manual weaving of fuchsia pink and purple strips. They were then assembled by hand in a stadium in Ghana, sometimes by up to 500 people at the same time.

“I have always been interested in work, in the conditions of work, in the history of work, and how work is inflicted on bodies,” the artist, known for his immense installations covered in canvas, explained to AFP on Tuesday. jute.

The whole, reinforced by invisible fishing nets to resist the wind, is adorned with a hundred "batakaris", traditional Ghanaian outfits which pass from generation to generation and are worn on all occasions, weddings, funerals, etc. .

Clothes marked by the wear and tear of the years, sweat, but also sometimes urine, which their owners spread on them when they take them off, to "separate the soul from the material", explains the artist, who started collecting them a dozen years ago.

Such a quest proves difficult as "it is difficult to convince people to give things that they have owned for generations", underlines Ibrahim Mahama, "people pass them on from one generation to another" and think that “the soul of the family is somehow contained in these tissues.”

Sometimes decorated with amulets, these outfits were sometimes also perceived as armor supposed to protect the soldiers of the colonial powers from bullets.

Named "Purple Hibiscus", named after the 2003 novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (published in French under the name "L'Hibiscus pourpre"), the work resonates with the place's past, destroyed during the Second World War and once a center of the fabric trade.

It presents a contrast between the hardness of concrete and the fragility and lightness of fabric and tunics full of stories, and should "allow us to reflect on the human condition" and "the question of life itself in relation to what the world we live in is," explains the artist.

Put to the test by the rain and wind of the British capital, the installation "will last as long as it can", laughs the artist, remembering when commissioning the work he wanted to brighten up the gray of the London sky.

“But once you have produced a work intended to be exhibited in public,” emphasizes Ibrahim Mahama, “the artist must accept that anything can happen to it.”