Cheick Sylla
Born in 1991 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
As a documentary and artistic photographer, he is primarily interested in stories rooted in a particular region. His artistic work is shaped by traditions and changing customs.
Works created during the project week
The works (print on canvas) are part of the travelling exhibition and can be purchased subject to availability.
For inquiries, please contact welcome@kulturbotschaften.at
Transmission
This image symbolises the association between wine and memory, two subjects of time. Old photographs represent memories, transmission, movements lived and shared, moments which, like wine, improve, mature and gain depth with age.
The bottle formed by the images becomes a metaphor for condensed memory, a ‘bottle of memory’ containing those who have perpetuated this wine tradition to this day, so that wine becomes a vehicle for tribute: just as we keep a bottle to celebrate a moment, we keep images to remember a life.
The soul of wine
This image evokes the invisible presence of the past – a memory that still inhabits places, objects and matter. The cellar becomes a space of resonance, where time settles like sediment at the bottom of a glass. The blurred figure embodies the faded but not vanished human trace: the memory of those who worked, drank and lived there.
The glass of wine, clear and present, symbolises living memory, the kind that can sill be touched, tased and smelled. Opposite to it, the silhouette embodies immaterial memory, that of gestures, transmission and nostalgia.
Souffle du temps/Breath of time
This image explores the presence of time in matter. The woven bottle, the central figure, embodies the memory of human gesture a fragile architecture where nature and culture intertwine. The bottles, repeated in the background, become a metaphor for accumulated time, for the persistence of memory in matter.
The warm, subdued light reveals the tension between life and disappearance: the candles, ready to be extinguished, remind us of the fragility of the present. The whole composition is a visual meditation on transformation that of fruit into wine, wine into memory, memory into trace.
Between silence and density, this image questions what time deposits in objects, and what humans leave of themselves in them.