Black.Light

The Lost Boy

Somewhere in Sierra Leone, a solitary child is standing in front of a dump. His arms fold over his head as he gazes at the skulls, which seem to grin at him.

This photograph of the boy Morie is excerpted from a travelogue of the war correspondents Pedro Rosa Mendes and Wolf Böwig, published in Germany as Schwarz.Licht – Passagen durch Westafrika, narratives about pain, desperation, and darkness from civil wars in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast.

The Third Dimension

Morie was the only one to survive a massacre in Bendu Malen/Sierra Leone in 1997. That day held more than a thousand casualties and Morie was an eyewitness of "no living thing." Which faces of casualties and murderers does Morie associate with the white sparkling skulls in that horrifying dump?

A third dimension is needed to continue these narratives, to augment the words and images.

Project Synopsis

We plan to create a deeper resonating portrait of Morie by merging words, photographs, and drawings for the narratives of Schwarz.Licht to build space for sustainable dramaturgy.

A selected crew of international graphic storytellers will participate. The project will republish 15 to 20 chapters from Schwarz.Licht on approximately 200 pages. This publication is the first element of our tripartite conceptual design, and will be published as a horizontal format hardcover in 36 cm x 28 cm. The stories all have deep emotional importance the audience will perceive with this size.

The Exhibition

The second component of this project is an international exhibition of the publication in countries such as Sierra Leone, Germany, Portugal, France and Italy. The regional aspect can be enlarged, if necessary.

The presentations will all be exhibited outside on the streets, with local structural conditions varying per location.

We want to retain the collective experiences, feelings, and memories of the audiences with the words, photography, and drawings – the narratives of a second publication. This is meant to be the trilogy's complement.

Schwarz.Licht

The book Schwarz.Licht – Passagen durch Westafrika by Pedro Rosa Mendes (words) and Wolf Böwig (Photography) from 2006 is a report of the incidents and impact throughout the civil war regions of western Africa at the changeover from the 20th to 21st century.

This report is part of the ongoing Kurosafrica project, the title of which reflects in part the name of Akira Kurosawa, a Japanese director (1910-1998), and the word "Africa." Kurosawa dealt with the subject of fratricide and King Lear in his film Ran. "Ran" is the Japanese word for chaos.

From this cohesion Mendes and Böwig built their main assumption of the report, the engagement of man against man, and marked the chaos of western Africa by the metaphor of a single AK47-assault-rifle used from the north to south, from the republic of Guinea via Sierra Leone, Liberia, to the Ivory Coast. The speech of violence.

Schwarz.Licht is translated from Portugese.