Traces: An interview with Hyacinthe Ouattara

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.

 

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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? 

 

Hyacinthe Ouattara: I find my fabrics in community spaces that have a social purpose, at flea markets for example. I search for particularly old fabrics that have a history. The shapes my textile pieces take are human architectures.

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.