In Burkina Faso, Francis Kéré’s astonishing “opera village”

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LETTER FROM OUAGADOUGOU

It is barely 1 p.m., the students have put away their notebooks and pushed the table-benches to dance in the middle of the class. Outside, the temperature is around 40°C in the sun, but the room is cool and airy. A light breeze blows through large green shutters. No need for fans or air conditioners here: “He never does more than 25 °C inside, children have no trouble concentrating! »enthuses Abdoulaye Ouédraogo, the director of the primary school in Ziniaré, about thirty kilometers northeast of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

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Welcome to the “opera village”, a vast architectural utopia created by Francis Kéré, the first African to have received the Pritzker Prize, considered the Nobel Prize for architecture. Primary school, canteen, housing, dispensary, workshops and artists’ residences… The whole of about twenty hectares was born from a crazy gamble. That of building an opera in the middle of the bush, with local natural materials and the help of the surrounding communities.

Since then, the extraordinary project, still under construction, has become a place of curiosity for foreign visitors, a source of inspiration for the country’s engineers and even a movie set for film shoots.

In 2009, when Christoph Schlingensief discovered the arid lands of Burkina Faso, the famous German playwright knew he was doomed. The director, who has been diagnosed with cancer, nevertheless wishes to carry out the project of his dreams. An “opera village”, which serves both as an artistic space for children and as a platform for cultural exchanges “Learning from Africa”.

“Traditional air conditioning”

The idea is not to “build a place to listen to arias sung and a symphony orchestra play”, then insists the artist, who decides to approach Francis Kéré. The German-Burkinabe architect has just built the first school in his village, in Gando. “No one had heard of opera, it was hard to believe, but Christoph’s first models impressed us”recalls Motandi Ouoba, the site administrator, who was skeptical at the start of the adventure.

Yet Christoph Schlingensief and Francis Kéré set off and spotted a hill near Ziniaré. The red earth is then only a vast field dotted with a few thorny trees. “It was a place of sacrifice for the communities, we also found traces of ancient life with the remains of metallurgical furnaces and old slag”says the administrator.

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