Rien n’est inerte (Nothing Is Inert)

In Rien n’est inerte (Nothing Is Inert), Malian-based artist Ange Dakouo transforms newspaper, cardboard, thread, and found materials into intricate woven structures charged with memory, protection, and spiritual force. Marking the artist’s first solo with Southern Guild, the exhibition comprises a new body of textile-like sculptural assemblages that expand Dakouo’s ongoing exploration of the ‘gris-gris’ – a protective amulet that has become the central motif of his practice.

The exhibition takes its title from a conviction that underpins Dakouo’s approach to making: there is no such thing as dead matter. Rather than treating his materials as passive surfaces, the artist understands them as repositories of experience, capable of retaining traces of the people, histories, and environments through which they have passed. Paper preserves the voices it has carried. Fabric holds the memory of the hands that touched it. A thread stretched between two points conveys a tension that transcends its function.

Born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and based in Bamako, Mali, Dakouo constructs his works from hundreds of small pieces of cardboard and newspaper, meticulously wrapped with cotton thread. He calls these elements “woven gris-gris,” after the small talismans or amulets traditionally worn on the body for protection from evil and misfortune.

Dakouo’s engagement with the gris-gris emerged from research conducted between 2015 and 2018 among Mali’s Donso hunters, a brotherhood invested in safeguarding ancestral memory and spiritual knowledge. Translating the amulet into a repeated sculptural unit, he expands an object of individual protection into something collective. Reproduced ad infinitum, hundreds of discrete elements accumulate into dense, intricately-patterned surfaces, transforming the singular amulet into an expansive whole.

This dimension of the work holds particular resonance considering the violence and social fragmentation that have marked Mali in recent years. Scholar Hélène Tissières has described Dakouo’s assemblages as invoking “nostalgia for a lost sense of unity” [1], in a context where extremist activity has intensified tensions between communities. Rather than representing these conditions directly, Dakouo responds to division through an insistent language of connection. The resulting works suggest that protection itself might be understood collectively: something generated through relation, accumulation, and mutual dependence.

For Dakouo, folding, wrapping, knotting and assembling are not merely methods of construction but ritual gestures, investing the repetitive act of making with symbolic and spiritual significance. Each assemblage becomes a threshold – a place where matter “ceases to be a surface and becomes a flow.” Though seemingly fixed, these structures are never static. They carry human histories – violence and resistance, memory and hope – whose force continues to circulate through them.

Newspaper occupies a particularly personal place in Dakouo’s practice. His father was a printer who would return home each evening with piles of publications, making printed matter part of the visual landscape of the artist’s childhood. Fragile, perishable, and commonplace, newspaper takes on a different life in Dakouo’s work: fragments of language, image, and ink remain embedded within its surface, even as its original information becomes obscured. A material intended to record the immediate present becomes instead a repository of accumulated histories.

This reflects Dakouo’s understanding that these traces do not simply disappear. “Wounds do not vanish; they shift. Memories do not fade away; they transform,” he explains.

These ideas find new expression in Rien n’est inerte, which marks a further evolution of Dakouo’s ongoing material research. The introduction of cotton fabric opens new possibilities for exploring texture, surface, and flexibility in dialogue with the leather, mirror, and iron already characteristic of his practice. Kalaban-coro #1 is an immense field of vivid red, punctuated by apertures, clusters of gris-gris, leather forms and flashes of mirror. By contrast, the cream-coloured Kati-fouga #1 and #2 are more rectilinear, their gridded structures giving way to cascading lengths of thread and sparse accents of red and black. Across these works, a restrained palette creates shifts in intensity and rhythm, as density yields to openness and ordered surfaces unravel into something more porous and unsettled.

The artwork titles trace a personal geography of making. Kalaban-coro and Kati-fouga refer to places in Mali, while Barbagianni takes its name from the studio Dakouo occupied during his residency at Civitella Ranieri in Italy. Created across different locations and periods, each work retains a connection to the particular circumstances of its emergence. For Dakouo, these environments, like the materials themselves, shape the creative process, giving rise to unexpected relationships and forms. As he writes, “Matter is not merely a medium; it is a presence. Fragility is not weakness; it is permeability.”

Dakouo’s understanding of the world is one in which everything exists in relation and the object is never closed but traversed. Rien n’est inerte is, in his words, “an affirmation that is as physical as it is spiritual” – a declaration against forgetting and indifference, and for the life that persists within fragments.

Rien n’est inerte runs concurrently with Bonolo Kavula's solo exhibion, Malome.


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