Arles festival showcases African archive treasures
Discover African archive treasures at the Arles festival, showcasing contested histories and identities through photography until October 4.
The 57th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles, one of Europe’s most influential photography festivals, focuses this year on archives from the African continent and the broader Mediterranean region. The event runs until October 4, framing archives not just as image repositories but as sites of contested histories, identities, and authority.
Christoph Wiesner, the festival’s director, said the curatorial approach aims to create space for complexity in a world often reduced to simplifications. Programming reflects this goal, featuring photographers and institutions digitizing and recontextualizing collections long overlooked by Western-centric narratives.
Reclaiming histories through vernacular photography
While Seydou Keïta and James Barnor have gained international recognition, this year’s festival highlights lesser-known figures. Paul Kodjo, a key photographer in post-independence Ivory Coast, receives his first major solo exhibition in France. His images, often compared to Malick Sidibé’s portraits of Bamako’s nightlife, capture a similar celebratory spirit but have rarely been shown outside West Africa.
The exhibition Ghana! Dreaming of Independence explores the country’s visual culture in the decades after its 1957 break from British rule. It draws from photobooks like Ghana: An African Portrait and The Roadmakers, while also including contemporary artists who rework Ghana’s archival materials. These pieces show how photography and print media helped shape national identity during political and cultural change.
Archives here are not static. They function as living documents, repurposed by a new generation. Thato Toeba uses photomontage and collage to challenge colonial narratives. His exhibition, Anyone Can Be Lucifer, disrupts archival images from Lesotho to create alternative histories. The work rejects a single version of the past, presenting instead fragmented realities.
Interdisciplinary approaches to memory and representation
The festival also includes artists from North Africa and the Mediterranean who combine photography with other mediums. Katia Kameli’s project, The Algerian Novel, merges film, archival material, and feminist storytelling to examine Algeria’s collective memory. Inspired by writer Assia Djebar, it weaves personal testimony with historical imagery to question official narratives.
Related: Streamline Your Move with These Tips
Amira Lamti’s Bent el Machta looks at the machta, the traditional custodian of wedding ceremonies in Tunisia’s Sahel region. Through photography, textiles, and video, she reinterprets marriage rituals, challenging fixed ideas about tradition and gender. Her work supports the festival’s broader effort to question how images are made and controlled, especially as photography’s reliability faces growing skepticism.
Not all displayed work relies on digital methods. Some artists use analogue processes like collage and photomontage to resist mainstream media and institutional influence. These techniques, rooted in early 20th-century avant-garde movements, allow communities to reclaim control over their own stories.
The focus on archives arrives as artificial intelligence and digital manipulation raise new concerns about truth. By centering marginalized voices and histories, Les Rencontres d’Arles treats archives as both preservation tools and battlegrounds for meaning.
For those familiar only with a few well-known African photographers, this year’s edition offers a broader view. It demonstrates the continent’s visual history is extensive and still being discovered. Wiesner noted the challenge is to confront reality while finding beauty within it.
Visitors interested in sustainable architecture may find parallels in how communities repurpose materials, much like the earthship homes thriving in deserts.
