ENGLISH (UPDATED MARCH 12, 2025)

Bouba Touré, activist, photographer, writer, farmer and film projectionist (France, Mali, etc.) who passed away in January 2022, left us a rich and unique archive documenting, since the 1970s, life and struggles in France and Mali of migrant workers living in foyers (migrant worker housing), the rise of the sans-papiers movement, and broader social and solidarity movements in France, as well as a vast community archive made up of many commissioned portraits from the diaspora and from the villages along the Senegal River at the border of Mali, Senegal and Mauritania, and a year-by-year documentation of the activities of the SomankidiCoura cooperative that he co-founded in 1977 in Mali.

Bouba’s personal archives are composed of negatives, photographs, slides, manuscripts and various other documents.

Most of these materials, sorted and gathered into 30 boxes, were deposited in April 2023 at the Departmental Archives of Seine-Saint-Denis in Bobigny, in accordance with the wishes he had expressed. The digitisation of this rich documentation cannot be fully taken on, nor for several years, by the departmental archives (limited budget and staff).

Without waiting, we would like to call on witnesses of these events over the past 50 years to clarify many useful and necessary details (names of people or context...), before this living memory risks fading or disappearing.

We digitised 20,000 negatives and 2,000 slides between summer 2022 and 2023 to allow access to these documents as quickly as possible to anyone interested—whether community leaders, relatives, activists, researchers or friends.

At the same time, some of us began the long-term work of pre-inventorying the documents and each series of negatives—around 80,000 negatives in total that Bouba had carefully dated and captioned throughout his life—so that others may later access and navigate his archives, begin research, and possibly complete the inventory.

This first batch of digitisation was financed with the prizes that the film Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices https://youtu.be/usK900plIlU), co-directed by Bouba Touré, received at Festival du Réel in France, at FCAT (Festival of African Cinema of Tarifa-Tangier), and at the Archivio Aperto festival in Italy, and with the support of institutions that backed Bouba’s work in 2022 and 2023 (Art Explora - Cité des Arts, Arbeitsmuseum Hamburg, AdKdW Köln).

A second batch of Bouba Touré negatives has been digitised, approximately 10,000 photographs taken from the 1990s until 2000 around the Sans-Papiers movement that he documented from within.

This crowdfunding has already partially funded this digitisation with an amount of €3,500 in 2024, continuing our collaboration with the specialised company TRIBVN based in Châtillon, France, which has a cost. (The TRIBVN laboratory offers high-quality archival scans in TIFF and JPEG formats).

In total, 30,000 negatives have thus been digitised, recently pre-inventoried and made accessible at the Departmental Archives of Seine-Saint-Denis (https://archives.seinesaintdenis.fr/n/archives-en-ligne/n:140), in large part thanks to you! A big thank you!

The fundraiser continues to digitise, together with the Departmental Archives of Seine-Saint-Denis and the external provider TRIBVN Lab, and to inventory the remaining 50,000 negatives. The inventory will be carried out through participatory work made up of meetings and workshops with the different stakeholders and users of Bouba’s archives.

Whatever the amount, everyone can contribute to this fundraiser! No need to create an account or register, it’s quick and credit card payments are 100% secure.
Cotizup charges a very high fee; we invite you to keep it to a minimum.

If you cannot contribute financially, please share this fundraiser as widely as possible.

THANK YOU!

The friends of Bouba

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