Hycaitnhe Ouattara is one of the exhibiting artists in the group show Traces, open at Ronewa Art Projects, Berlin, from January 31 to April 12, 2025. Ouattara's textile hangings weave together found fabrics and home textiles into patchwork fiber scuptures that can be thought of as microcosms of humanity.
Ronewa gallery manager April Dell chatted to Ouattara about his new "Fragility' series of works that incoporate indigo blue dye into his textile works.
April Dell: Tell me about some of the found textiles you chose for your ‘Fragility’ works in the Traces exhibition. Where did you find them, and why did you choose them?
My process of combining these fabrics together echoes an elsewhere, questioning social environments, time, memory, ambivalence, and the complexity of the world around us.
HO: The indigo blue I use comes from my hometown, Diébougou, in Burkina Faso. It’s a way for me to connect the material to the source. What interests me is that it comes from a tree, the indigo tree, and the tree is a symbol of humanity.
It's also a blue that you won't find in a traditional store selling painting supplies but rather in a market, so it's a social place that's a little offbeat.
HO: The knotted and intertwined threads are an expression of the sensory experience of living, of form but also of formlessness, of how to navigate the world through the path of the imaginary and ancestral.
It's a harmonized, luminous chaos. I'm looking for a kind of poetry that soothes this chaos, in the image of the chaotic world in which we live, an organic inner logic.
HO: My practice – as a poetic, visual contemplation - is a kind of quest, and elsewhere is the fragile place of the unfathomable and the elusive.
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About the author
April Dell
April Dell is an art writer from New Zealand, living and working in Berlin since 2012. As the gallery manager and communications manager at Ronewa Art Projects, April showcases Ronewa's roster of international artists through exhibition project management, press coordination, and online communication channels.
Contemporary art has long been a passion of hers, and she loves nothing more than experiencing and writing about art. She has a B.A. from Otago University, New Zealand, where she studied Art History and Film and Media Studies. April also has a Graduate Certificate in Communications and Public Relations and provides communications services within the arts and culture industry.
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