Living Montage: Bouba Touré’s Photographic and Political Practice

‘I want to live in time. And even after I’m gone, I want time to count very much. There you go, I don’t want to die. To die is to be forgotten’, photographer, filmmaker, farmer and activist Bouba Touré states in his film Bouba Touré, 58 Rue Trousseau, 7511 Paris, France (2008), a title borrowed from Touré’s former address in Paris.1 There he observes the interior walls of his apartment, covered with posters, pamphlets and photographs from the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Giving each document equal attention, he comments and contextualises their content – from the Burkinabé Marxist-Leninist Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso until his murdering in 1987, to Touré’s own mother. Everyone pictured belongs to a community that Touré has spent his life nurturing. And while Touré waits for the alarm clock to ‘ring’, to awaken ‘the African consciousness’, as he calls it, we see a large number of clocks next to the documents on his walls: ‘because time matters a lot’.2