EXB 2026 Softcover, 1st edition, 140p New Nuits Balnéaires has developed a multifaceted artistic practice: his photography, his preferred medium, borrows from other disciplines such as cinema, theatre, literature and poetry. For him, image creation is a hybrid space where reality and dreams coexist. The Malinké and Agni-Bona cultures, from which he originates, strongly influence his universe – tales, epics, proverbs, metaphors – and rub shoulders with contemporary arts: his works weave infinite geographies, drawing on the melting pot of ancient civilisations and confronting the complexities of the modern world. In 2024, Nuits Balnéaires created Eboro: a visual journey into the “beyond” (eboro in the Agni-Bona tradition). The photographic series tells the story of an exiled poet, inspired by his uncle, Noël X. Ebony, a figure of Ivorian literature in the 1980s who disappeared mysteriously. Following in the footsteps of this poetic heritage and his verbal experiences, Nuits Balnéaires composes a fiction in which a character (poet and fisherman) passes from the real world to the world of dreams. The photographer plays with symbols from ancestral Ivorian cultures, mixing them with motifs from the modern city (dehumanised suburbs). In a dreamlike atmosphere and an aesthetic that emphasises the power of colours (black and red symbolise passage and transition to the afterlife), the character of the exiled poet (like his uncle before him) leaves the city and crosses the desert before reaching the spirit world, where strange creatures wearing crimson headdresses await him. Eboro blends literary, pictorial, historical and symbolic influences. The fable speaks of isolation, exile, melancholy and age-old tradition. In this journey back to the source (the world of ancestors), Nuits Balnéaires questions the mechanisms of domination and the fragility of our cultural and spiritual heritage. His visual language plunges us into the confines of the tangible, between familiar spaces and more surreal ones. ‘A still image has an evocative power that does not depend on the unfolding of an action, but on what it suggests, on what the viewer projects onto it,’ explains the photographer. Eboro goes back in time and crosses borders, oscillating between unfathomable mystery and wonder; he reveals himself in a black and red book, printed on craft paper, punctuated with the words of poet Noël X. Ebony.
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