He walked each day toward the horizon, convinced that one day he would be able to touch the sky. He never would. But along the way, he discovered what matters most: learning to look, to listen, to dream, and to understand that the world reveals itself to those who move forward without seeking to possess it.
At the origin of this exhibition lies a childhood gesture: walking. Walking to understand, walking to know where the earth ends and where the sky begins. Inspired by the artist’s autobiographical film Petit Berger (Little Shepherd), the exhibition offers this intimate narrative as a key to reading the universe of Saïdou Dicko. Drawing from his childhood memories, the artist recounts a quest begun at the age of four. A Fulani shepherd, he walked each day toward the horizon, convinced that one day he would be able to touch the sky. He never would. But along the way, he discovered what matters most: learning to look, to listen, to dream, and to understand that the world reveals itself to those who move forward without seeking to possess it.
“I became a shepherd when I was four years old because I had a goal; my goal was to see the end of the earth, the place where the earth and the sky meet, and go there to touch the sky as I could not reach up to it.”
This third solo exhibition at AFIKARIS Gallery explores Saïdou Dicko’s oeuvre as a memory in motion, where childhood becomes an inner territory, a place of return and projection. Where the Earth and the Sky Meet does not designate a fixed point, but a fragile and poetic space: the horizon, where imagination takes over from reality, where the unreachable becomes a form of learning, and where failure transforms into wisdom. Not touching the sky means entering another kind of relationship with the world - attentive and humble - where direct experience in contact with nature becomes a source of knowledge. To be, in the artist’s own words, “life's pupil and nature's schoolboy.”
Saïdou Dicko’s work is inseparable from his life journey. Nourished by his Burkinabè roots, his travels, and his anchoring between Africa and Europe, his works bear the trace of movement. The figures he depicts and the landscapes he evokes never describe a specific place; instead, they testify to a circulating memory, to a lived space where the intimate meets the universal. “I am the shadow that navigates a virtual world that has become so real that my reality has become virtual,” he writes in Shadowed People. The shadow thus becomes a body in motion, navigating between real and imagined worlds.
Dicko is a creator of shadows. They are born in the crushing light of the Sahel, in black trees absorbing the sun, in the coolness sought at midday. The shadow is never an absence: it is refuge and memory. It has no social class and no nationality. It is simply “the shadow—your shadow, their shadows, his shadow, my shadow.” By covering his figures in black paint, the artist erases individual features to allow a shared humanity to emerge, freed from imposed identities.
On the gallery walls, silhouettes of children emerge. Black, full, at first frozen as if suspended, they seem to play, dance, imitate birds. In the background, the video resonates: the artist’s singing voice and that of the child narrator guide the viewer from one tableau to the next. Gradually, the silhouettes come to life, almost lifting off the ground. In The Golden Bird or Les ailes des cousins (The Cousins’ Wings), the bodies seem ready to take flight. Elsewhere, in Sois mes pattes, je serai tes ailes (Be My Legs, I’ll Be Your Wings), L’ombre est là (The Shadow Is There), or La démarche des oiseaux (The Birds’ Walk), childhood becomes a promise: the promise of rising, not to escape, but to dream further. The gestures are simple, the stories immense. A tin can becomes an aeroplane, a branch becomes a wing, a tree becomes a refuge. Colour, omnipresent, converses with these shadows. Market fabrics digitally sculpted on photographic paper form interior landscapes, woven from memories, travels, and reveries.
Saïdou Dicko defines himself neither as a photographer nor as a draughtsman, but as a visual artist who weaves images - thread by thread, gesture by gesture - blending photography, watercolour, textiles, and digital media. From childhood, drawing became the first language of his imagination, as he traced the shadows of his animals on the ground.
Throughout the works, figures, shadows, and horizons become passages between the visible and the invisible, the earthly and the celestial. The line where the earth meets the sky is not a destination to be conquered, but a space of learning; a place where movement matters more than arrival, and where knowledge is born from attentive presence to the world. With Where the Earth and the Sky Meet, Dicko invites us to slow down, to look differently, and to relearn how to inhabit the world like a child shepherd: to follow one’s dreams, create new ones, cultivate hope and perseverance, marvel at the simplicity of living things, and move forward -never taking the same path twice.
