The World of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and his Object teaching
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, self-taught encyclopaedist and blacksmith of words, lives and works in Abidjan. He was born in 1923 in Zéprégühe, Ivory Coast. While working as a civil servant in the French colonial regime in Senegal, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré had a divine revelation. On March 11, 1948, seven colorful suns opened up in front of his eyes and drew a circle of beauty around Mother-Sun. Thus, Bruly Bouabré took on the new identity of Cheik Nadro: the one who does not forget. Since then he became a researcher, collecting his observation about arts and traditions, poetry, tales, religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. His aim was to find a way to preserve and transmit the knowledge of his group, the Bété people, as well as the knowledge of the world. His entire work consists in communicating his observations and thoughts in a unique presentation style: series of drawings on postcard size cardboard pieces of paper, made by using ballpoint pens and colored pencils.
The drawings selected for this exhibition are coming out of the alphabet that Bruly Bouabré invented in the 1950s. The alphabet consisted of 448 monosyllabic pictograms that symbolize phonetic syllables and transcribe all human sounds. Bruly Bouabré’s challenge was to help Bété people to learn to read more quickly and at the same time, to allow the transcription of every language. The objective here is to explore Bruly Bouabré’s intention in creating a specific African writing from scenes of everyday life that can be read as “Object teaching, Object lessons.” Object teaching is an educational process that uses intuition. All the drawings by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré are related to different symbols about daily life, science, and culture with an educational purpose. Besides representing a sound or a syllable, each image epitomizes an action, a feeling, a social rule, a concept, a myth, a dream and a behavior. More than a simple object, figure or animal, each drawing expresses, through a conceptual or figurative appearance, a universal language about the value of cultural métissage and the achievement of universality.
We wish to thank the Agnès b foundation for graciously lending the images from its collection.
k'a yelema productions 