Living Montage. Bouba Touré’s Photographic and Political Practice

‘I want to live in time. And even after I’m gone, I want time to count very much. There you go, I don’t want to die. To die is to be forgotten’, photographer, filmmaker, farmer and activist Bouba Touré states in his film Bouba Touré, 58 Rue Trousseau, 7511 Paris, France (2008), a title borrowed from Touré’s former address in Paris.  There he observes the interior walls of his apartment, covered with posters, pamphlets and photographs from the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Giving each document equal attention, he comments and contextualises their content – from the Burkinabé Marxist-Leninist Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso until his murdering in 1987, to Touré’s own mother. Everyone pictured belongs to a community that Touré has spent his life nurturing. And while Touré waits for the alarm clock to ‘ring’, to awaken ‘the African consciousness’, as he calls it, we see a large number of clocks next to the documents on his walls: ‘because time matters a lot’.

‘Life is a struggle’, Touré continues behind the camera, his own image only sweeping past in mirrors or in reflecting glass – a way for Touré to photograph, film and write within and for his community of peasant migrant workers.  Refusing individual authorship and the extraction of information at the service of a hegemonic Western worldview, his means and tools activate the living self-consciousness of his community, which it was refused for centuries. To borrow a concept from Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray, he produces ‘militant images’, which ‘comprise any form of image or sound’, found or created, ‘produced in and through film-making practices dedicated to the liberation struggles and revolutions of the late twentieth century.’  While offering an important example of militant images, Touré’s film simultaneously functions as a self-portrait – the photographer insistently using his own gaze to transpose his lived experiences – while depicting the struggles of the many: ‘I’m walking with time, and as time is infinite, there will always be something to do’ he says, proving Roland Bathes’ ‘punctum of time and death’ to be wrong.  In his reading of Barthes and the impossible encounter between the photographer, the photographed and the spectator, the art historian and critic Michael Fried considers the punctum as ‘a guarantor of antitheatricality’ – blocking any social or political relation within the photograph and the realm of its observers.  In Barthes’ own words, ‘the photographic image is full […] nothing can be added to it’; it is ‘without future’.

Refusing to separate the photograph as much as the photographer from the photographed, Touré rather insists on the continuous life of the movement in which all of these partake. This aligns him with his the late contemporary, photographer, writer and theorist Alan Sekula who, in his essay ‘Photography Between Labour and Capital’, argued that photography constructs ‘an imaginary economy’.  Sekula’s question ‘[w]hat futures are promised; what futures are forgotten,’ seem to echo Touré’s argument: ‘one cannot know what a photography will become,’ and thus how it will be construed.  Revisiting photographic archives of mine workers from the 1900s, Sekula discussed how historical and social memory may be ‘preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs.’  This may cause, he argues, a ‘depoliticization of photographic meaning’– an abstract use of the media that results in a ‘loss of context’ through a denial of the politics of photography, which for Sekula are inherent.  Tracing such tendencies throughout modernity, the author discusses the central role of photographic and image making in both Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia and in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s founding of Taylorism. I understand what Sekula saw as a depoliticization of the image through the industrial abstraction of images of workers in line with what Touré calls, in his film, ‘to die’, that is, ‘to be forgotten’.  Both Touré and Sekula emphasise the opposite: the need for workers to document their own life and struggle, the need for it to be circulated amongst their own and future generations’ consciousnesses. A consciousness that Touré himself struggles to awaken when materialising the circulation of lives between two geopolitically segregated contexts: West Africa and Western Europe, hence calling for what he termed the ‘auto-communication between people.’

At the age of 17, in 1965, Touré left the newly founded republic of Mali, and travelled to the capital of its former colonizer, France. As most of his maternal and extended family, there he experienced what Saidyia Hartman calls ‘the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment,’ upheld by racism.  As a peasant youth, Touré hadn’t been admitted to study in the schools of Bamako, open to children of the colonisers and their milieu only. After Mali gained its independence in 1960, many Malians migrated to Paris to work in the car industry, underpaid and beyond a sustainable number of hours. Like his comrades, Touré saved his salary to transfer to his family, disconnected from the economic infrastructure of the Malian cities and without local resources to live from. Lacking housing, the Paris migrants had to squeeze up in poor hostel rooms, often sleeping over a dozen in each, which increased the risk of spreading tuberculosis. These complexes were also poorly equipped, heated with coal ovens, leading to intoxication and sometimes death – which in 1971 sparked a long-lasting wave of hostel rent strikes and occupations in Paris. The previous year, Touré had decided to quit his factory work and to leave the hostel life to become a film projectionist, while continuing to photograph the migrant worker’s movement from within. Up until that moment, his Paris years in the factory and in the emerging migrant workers’ struggle are outlined as if in spoken language, as attested in his novel Notre case est à Saint-Denis 93. Despite his particular role in the community, Touré has excluded all details – one being the camera – that would reveal himself as the main character, and exchanged his first name to one of his others, given by his grandfather Banta Touré. This is not a random choice, as Touré presents himself as the reincarnation of Banta the elder: ‘I can’t talk about myself without talking about the person I’m incarnating. My entire story starts there.’  In Touré’s and Raphaël Grisey’s feature film Xaraasi Xanne – Crossing Voices(forthcoming), Touré visits the fields of Verdun, where his grandfather was one of the very few to survive the battle of 1916: ‘He came here in 1914–1918, against his will. He didn’t choose to be in the French army and he came here to fight the Germans.’

Anticipating the experience of the French migrant workforce by two generations, the latent biographic character of Banta in Touré’s novel makes it clear that European humanitarian standards still don’t apply to them. Thus far, Touré’s continuation in the steps of his grandfather hadn’t changed much, but during evening courses in French, held by local activists of the same age, working and living conditions were brought up in the conversation. Simultaneously, sparks of the forthcoming May 68 movement were prominent amongst colleagues in the factory, catalysing a struggle for ‘equal work, equal pay’, migrant workers being paid less than their French colleagues.  In 1966, Touré – who didn’t know how to read and write properly – purchased a small Kodak Retinette with the intention to photograph what he simply refers to as ‘our life’.  This became the starting point of his struggle to make sure that these experiences wouldn’t die with his family. From then on, by interlinking the life conditions of France and of its former colonies, Touré produced a different picture of Europe than the one displayed in mainstream media – including in his homeland.

Ever since that moment, Touré has continued to document the scarcely changing living conditions of migrant workers, often undocumented, in the northern suburbs of Paris. During his first years of activity, Touré wasn’t allowed to photograph inside the factory or in the hostels and was compelled to work under the radar: ‘They didn’t want anyone to see the conditions we were living in there.’  Nevertheless, the legal right to unionise also covered migrant workers, so Touré and his comrades joined the migrant workers’ section of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT, ‘General Confederation of Labour’) – at the time affiliated with the French Communist Party. Simultaneously with the hostel strikes of 1971, they founded the independent association Association Culturel des Travailleurs Africains (ACTAF, ‘Cultural Association of African Workers’), hosted by the local CGT section. The adjective ‘cultural’ covered up the political discourse of the association’, as the hostel rules didn’t allow political gatherings either. Police raids recurred but, nevertheless, ACTAF insistently arranged gatherings to discuss the political dimensions of their living and working conditions and to communicate the independence struggles in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Mozambique, then under Portuguese rule. Documenting ‘our life’, as he insistently calls it in the genitive plural, Touré’s photographic practice is founded from within a community of shared and lived experience. Many French comrades joined him and his extended family in their struggle, Touré photographing along without anyone questioning to the presence of the camera – most probably because he never attempted to produce any objective picture of the situations documented: ‘If they don’t know me, I certainly know their parents,’ he says.  The resulting photographs depict the intimate sphere of these fragile contexts, as with, for instance, the fellow migrant workers often being photographed in their beds. One of these, Un jeune qui a repris le lit de son père, chambre 111, Foyer Charonne, 24 novembre 2009 (2009) portrays a young man resting on the same mattress as his father once did, underscoring the repetition of destiny over generations.

‘And so, the aim of this photograph, was part of our work to avoid that our children would live this life’, Touré explains, referring to his life as a migrant worker in France.  This reproduction of exploitation was also the reason why he and thirteen fellow activists decided to practice modern farming in the French countryside, preparing for their return to Mali. Throughout 1975–76, the fourteen friends and ACTAF associates went through a traineeship in the region of Haute-Marne in France, learning how to sustain market gardening (‘culture maraîchère’). The same years, the French government encouraged immigrants to return, which for Touré’s was impossible as the situation in African countries had not changed. ‘One needs an ideological determination, a project, to live there,’ he says, explaining that he and his comrades felt the need to do something.

In the fall of 1976, on the shore of the Senegal River, they consequently laid the foundation of Somankidi Coura (‘New Somankidi’) ‘a village of struggle, of production,’ as Touré defines it in his film, while we can see him handling the poster of the ‘multifunctional cooperative’. Since then, the fields of Somankidi Coura are watered with the help of a pump installed in the river bank, enabling an agriculture not reliant on rain.  Such ‘a subsistence agriculture’ (une agriculture vivrière) meant to provide alimentary self-sufficiency, therefore replacing the need to work from France to transfer money back home.  The notion of vivrière derives from vivres (‘food’ or ‘means of subsistence’), while it also is a rephrasing of the French word ouvrier(‘worker’) by Touré he uses when explaining his practice as a ‘working class photographer.’ Today, the cooperative is inhabited by around five hundred people and at its centre, the local school building – another sign of the prosperity of the cooperative – houses Touré’s photographic archive of Somankidi Coura’s development throughout the decades. ‘It’s important that future generations learn how this all came into being,’ Touré states, describing his photographs as ‘catalysers of the collective’.  Inscribing the history of the village within the cooperative itself, its younger habitants may learn that it is possible to live on independently, in situ, without relying on the unsustainable conditions of migrant work. Consequently, the museum of Somankidi Coura is currently under construction, instituting the village’s history at the centre of its habitants’ daily life.

While May 68 instigated Touré and his comrades to politicise their living and working conditions, its discourse still involved forms of literacy that excluded parts of the movement. This is why Touré’s photographic practice came to be such an important contribution, continuously materialising conditions that otherwise would remain recondite both in France and in his homeland. Somankidi Coura is driven by a socialist ideal of self-sustainment and of relations based on solidarity where women are also taking the lead in the community. Insisting on the fact that the photography of workers in action would gain importance in the future, Touré claims that ‘[the] aim of our struggle is to immortalise what we have lived through, but the photos belong to nobody’ – underscoring that the foundation of the cooperative also laid the basis of a self-authorised narration, sustaining a self-image beyond the dependence on France or Europe.  Yet, many lives remain to be sustained, and from 1981 until this day, Touré travels between Somankidi Coura and Paris to cross-document peasant and migrant life and the continuous struggle amongst workers to improve their scarcely changing conditions without papers, in France. Until he retired in 2007, Touré continued to work as a film projectionist in Paris, while spending the winters in the cooperative. Through his insistence on stopping the loop of migrant workers becoming inescapably alienated by the French system, and to instead take hold of life itself, by precisely remaining alive ‘in time’, Touré opposes the abstract labour time that separates the worker from their living temporality, which causes time, as it its mediated operatively, to stand still. Refusing the living worker to be momentarily and materially disconnected from the circuit of exchange which much photography arguably feeds, Touré sustains the movement of a collectively managed time through the image, in Paris and in Somankidi Coura, functioning not as a temporal fragment, but as a living montage.