It’s a green leaf with an apex that had been chewed off by an insect or a bird.
For everything we took from nature, we had to permission from nature.” As we stroll across the farm, which Fofana has planted with gala yiri and gala yirini, he stops me. “But we could never take more than what we needed. “We were told by the elderly people that if you get a cut or a scrape, you can just take this gala plant and rub it into the wound,” he says. Indigo is often discussed in terms of “Indigofera”, one common genus of indigo-bearing plants, but Fofana believes that the appropriate context for capturing the magic of indigo is best expressed through the Bambara (Mali’s lingua franca) words for it – the “gala yiri (lonchocarpus cyanescens) and “gala yirini” (indigofera arrecta) that he knew in his childhood. Natural indigo is a family of blue dyes that are typically produced from the roughly 800 species or so of the world’s indigo-bearing plants, of which more than 600 species can today be found in Africa, nearly 200 in Asia, about 80 in America, and 50 to 60 in Australia. This kind of reverence for nature is essential to Fofana’s craft. “There used to be two of them,” he explains, “but the other horse died recently.” I hear him whispering to Garance, assuring her that in time, she will get the partner she needs – “à bientôt” he repeats. He heads over to his blue-eyed, white horse Garance, and starts to stroke her hair. In a little fold of Mali, aligned to the grandeur of the sandcoloured stones called the Mont Mandé Mountains, Fofana is walking across a tract of farmland he purchased three years ago.
The soul of Fofana’s work lies in the singularity of each moment – each stage exists uniquely as a fingerprint does. Yet each step is an ode to the overarching process, rather than slavish activities in thrall to the product that emerges at the end.
The final stage is the unstitching of the resists to display the pattern. Next comes the harvesting of these crops the extraction of the colour and spinning of the cotton threads the weaving of the cloth and the stitching of resists to create patterns all the while preparing vats and keeping the bacteria they contain happy and then the dyeing and re-dyeing of cotton. It begins with the planting of indigo leaves and cotton. Each indigo textile and artwork he creates is the result of a complex chain that can take anywhere from four months to a year to complete. Beside Fofana’s 19,000 followers on Instagram, Campbell’s 4.9 million might make his comparison somewhat reasonable, but we quickly agree that it’s a product or a person that tends to become famous, rather a process. In the night air of Fofana’s studio, I catch the ellipsis in the silence between us the invisible question mark that suffixes his last point. It’s not that Campbell isn’t great, just that I have no way to consider Fofana and Campbell within the context of a comparison. “If I am, it’s only because I have standards, and is that so bad?” Is Fofana a perfectionist? “Maybe,” he says.
When I told her, she looked at me and said, ‘You, sir, must be difficult to live with.’” We both laugh. “Once,” he says, “a woman came to tell me how beautiful she found my work, particularly the finishing stitches. His focus on the eggshell cloth lying on his work table is almost surgical: perhaps the effect of the scissors, or the stillness of his body contrasted to the industry of his hands and wrists. As we speak about his work, he starts to clean up the frayed edges of some plain pieces of fabric that are soon to be transformed into indigo shawls. “I don’t think I am.įor more than 30 years, Aboubakar Fofana has worked to master indigo dyeing, operating out of his studio in Bamako, Mali. Looking down from behind black-rimmed glasses, he briefly considers the two perspectives on fame present in the room – mine and his. “Well, I’m not Naomi Campbell,” he says, dropping his eyes to the ground. A prickly question like that might make someone a little uncomfortable, so I’m relieved when he laughs.
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