2023-09-06 11:52:00
« Night is night, all cats are gray » sang the famous zouglou group Espoir 2000 in their hit “Abidjan Farot” in 2006. Ivory Coast was in crisis, cut in two, but the musicians resisted the curfews, the tensions, and compensated with partying for the misdeeds of the political storm which had caused the country to fall into a powerful depression. The maquis and nightclubs will be the heart of this resilience, to the point of seeing the night give birth to new trends. This is how the coupé-décalé established itself with its atalakus, its DJs, its dancers and its silver throws, to the point of eclipsing zouglou, it was believed, until the latter took advantage of the wind of the ambiance artists to settle back into the maquis, live and more alive than ever. Ivory rap and its latest trend, maïmouna, are also its heirs today. Because it is in these maquis, and also in the nightclubs, that the popular culture of Abidjan and, by contagion, of an entire country continues to be forged.
It is around these places that an entire economy has developed, albeit informal, which provides a living not only for artists but also for a number of street restaurants, sellers of handkerchiefs and cigarettes, parking attendants and street vendors. It is in these places of sociability that the heart of the night beats. And too bad for those who sleep. Léo Montaz, anthropologist and his fellow photographer Camille Millerand, did not sleep much. For PAM, they take you on a journey (in 3 episodes) to these places of life, these places of night, to meet those who make them, in the beautiful and the slums, with old fathers and young firsts, acrobatic dancers and mothers fighting to earn their bread… a multi-generational and multicolored scene, in the light of headlights or strobes, washed down with music, beer, and sometimes champagne. Are their nights more beautiful than their days? Maybe… but either way, as the song said, “sooner or later, the day will break”.
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