MÉLISSA TRAORÉ

Art Shaped by Memory and Inherited Gestures

“… When I create work… it is in my view a metaphor reflecting an alternative response to examine … possibilities and extend the boundaries in art. … My work can represent links in the evolving narrative of memory and identity.”

– El Anatsui

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mélissa Traoré is a French–Cameroonian–Malian artist born in Cameroon in 1990. She currently lives and works in the Drôme region, where she is based at L’Usine in Poët-Laval—a collaborative hub and incubator for artists and artisans.

She initially trained in psychology, earning a Master’s degree (first year), from the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 2010, before completing a State Diploma as a specialized educator. Alongside her studies, she worked in psychological support, notably in suicide prevention with long-term prison inmates. It was within this context that she began to explore art as a tool for care, expression, and guidance. She went on to work for over a decade with individuals facing severe social and economic precarity.

In 2022, Traoré turned fully toward her artistic practice, joining a studio at the Centre d’Art de L’Usine. A self-taught artist, she develops installation-based work at the intersection of visual art, sculpture, sound, and video. Her practice emerges from an ongoing dialogue between social issues, materials, and spatial environments.

In 2023, prompted by the effects of industrialization and the gradual disappearance of traditional artisanal practices in her country of origin, she initiated Màari, an artistic documentary project that unfolds through research and culminates in multdisciplinary works, including installations. Developed in collaboration with sociologist and anthropologist Baïlo Diallo (University of Clermont-Ferrand), the project included three months of field immersion alongside craftswomen. The National Museum of Cameroon is a partner in this initiative.

Mélissa Traoré is a member of the Mimésis Arts Recherches Actions collective, which brings together artists, researchers, and historians in collaborative inquiry.

Her work has been exhibited in France and internationally, including at the Embassy Festival in The Hague (2024) and the Méthamorphosis Institute for Cultural Mediation and Contemporary Art in Yaoundé. She regularly participates in conferences and panel discussions, engaging with themes such as memory, invisibility, temporality, and identity in contemporary art.

© Mélissa Traoré: Ligatures, 2024: Lashed weaving crafted by hand, following the traditional raffia weaving technique of Bamiléké craftswomen. Chicken wire and industrial fabrics incorporating the symbols of “Ndop”—the traditional cloth of the Bamiléké people. Diameter 87 cm, Maison des Deux Terres, residence in Grignan, June 2024, © Charles Borggraef / © ADAGP, Paris

“If we do not know where we come from, we cannot know where we are going” are the words of Mélissa Traoré that deeply resonated with me—perhaps echoing my own experience of long-term expatriation and the recent return to my home country, accompanied by a lingering sense of displacement. For Traoré, art has become a space of reconciliation, allowing her to navigate and embrace her multiple identities and origins. Born in Cameroon, in the capital of Yaoundé, where she lived for ten years, and now based in France, she channels this layered sense of belonging into her practice. Through her work, she expresses a profound belief in the power of memory as a foundation for renewal: as long as memory endures, she suggests, there remains the possibility to rebuild, reconnect, and imagine a shared future.

This Franco–Cameroonian–Malian artist explores the notions of memory and cultural heritage through a diverse range of artistic forms, including visual installations, sculpture, and video. Each body of work is preceded by an extensive process of research and immersion: a deep engagement with cultural contexts, encounters with communities, collaborations with researchers, archival exploration, reading, and careful observation. In Ligatures, for example, Mélissa Traoré delves into the cultural practices and inherited gestures of the Bamiléké people, creating a dialogue between material, memory, and transmission.

Her artistic practice is deeply informed by an ethno-sociological and psychological perspective, rooted in her academic background in psychology and her years of experience working in the field of prison care with long-term incarcerated inmates as part of suicide prevention efforts. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Traoré examines how memories are carried, transformed, and passed on—revealing art as a space where cultural heritage can be preserved, questioned, and reimagined.

“In 2023, I undertook a three-month residency with craftswomen in western Cameroon, where I immersed myself in their practices and the knowledge surrounding the traditional technique of resist-dyeing by binding. This process involves weaving messages encoded through symbols into raffia fibers, creating a dialogue between material, gesture, and memory.

Through this experience, I observed how the increasing intensity and fluidity of exchanges are transforming these practices and the techniques once transmitted through initiation rites. As economic networks expand, they intertwine with human relationships, allowing gestures and materials to travel across borders. Yet, in this movement, some traditions risk fading away, surviving primarily through the memories of those who continue to carry and preserve this knowledge”, explains Mélissa. In this context it is important to emphasize that heritage is a living, evolving system shaped by movement, exchange, and reinterpretation. In order to remain alive, heritage must be able to absorb new influences and respond to the changing world around it. Her work explores this constant movement between preservation and transformation, questioning what is lost, what survives, and what is reinvented through time.

This approach is reflected in her use of materials, particularly wax fabric, which carries a complex history shaped by colonial exchanges and global circulation. Its presence in her installations is intentional: although often associated with African identity, wax textiles are themselves the result of intertwined histories, having been developed through colonial trade networks and industrial production. The fabric used in Ligatures, for example, was produced in the Netherlands, highlighting the layered journeys of materials and the interconnected histories embedded within them.

Alongside wax, Traoré explores raffia weaving traditions from Cameroon, particularly those of Indigenous communities in the Western Grassfields. Raffia craftsmanship encompasses a wide range of techniques used to create textiles, clothing, baskets, and objects imbued with cultural and spiritual meaning. Woven on traditional looms, raffia fibers form intricate structures, patterns, and symbols that carry collective knowledge and ancestral narratives.

“I explore the role of craftsmanship in an industrialized world and pay tribute to forms of knowledge that have been rendered invisible.”

© Mélissa Traoré: Dialogue, 2025, hand-woven using a tie-resist technique inspired by African and Japanese practices. Laser-cut steel, metal, industrial wax-print fabrics. Ø 1 m, 90 cm high, 113 kg, © Laurent Quinkal / © ADAGP, Paris

Dialogue (2025) explores the delicate balance between industrial force and artisanal sensitivity, while questioning power structures and the historical marginalization of female artisans.

The sculpture brings together steel and textile in two circular forms, each measuring one meter in diameter. The solidity and permanence of steel—often associated with strength—meets the flexibility and vulnerability of textile, a material that is at once fragile and enduring. This juxtaposition reflects the ongoing tension between industrial production and ancestral craftsmanship.

Laser-cut patterns puncture the steel, echoing the precision and intricacy of handwork. In contrast, the textile—created using a resist-dyeing technique inspired by both African and Japanese traditions—carries the imprint of inherited gestures and embodied knowledge.

The impact of industrialization on these practices remains central to Mélissa Traoré’s work. As she notes: “I explore the role of craftsmanship in an industrialized world and pay tribute to forms of knowledge that have been rendered invisible. The work invites reflection on transmission, identity, and collective memory.”

© Mélissa Traoré: Bandes, 2024: Tie-dyed weaving created through manual manipulation, using the resist-dyeing technique. Cotton fabric, raffia, dye 4 panels, each measuring 1 meter wide by 3 meters high, © Laurent Quinkal / © ADAGP, Paris

I was particularly fascinated by the story behind Bandes (2024), an installation that sublimates the ancient writing system known as A Ka U Ku, developed around 1896 by Sultan Njoya, King of the Bamoun. As Mélissa explains, the idea of creating symbols—“a book that speaks without being heard”—came to him in a dream. Between 1896 and 1918, the script evolved through several transformations, eventually giving rise to the symbolic language found today in Ndop textiles.

Drawing on this legacy, Bamiléké craftswomen weave and unweave these codified signs using raffia fibers, embedding messages within cotton panels. This knowledge, once transmitted through generations, is increasingly threatened by processes of mass industrialization.

It is within this broader context of transmission that Mélissa’s personal history resonates: “One of my most vivid memories of Cameroon is my grandmother’s fishing village, where she practiced sewing extensively, having learned through imitation—through the careful observation and repetition of gestures. This early encounter with embodied knowledge deeply shaped my own path. My grandmother’s story extends this lineage further: she learned weaving from her father, who had acquired the technique from German colonizers, revealing a chain of transmission marked by both continuity and rupture.”

© Mélissa Traoré: Ancêtres (Ancestors), 2024, Sculptures shaped by hand using the traditional artisanal technique of the “sacred sculptors” of western Cameroon. Makoré, an exotic wood from Cameroon. © Laurent Quinkal / © ADAGP, Paris

With Ancêtres (Ancestors), Mélissa evokes the animistic beliefs of the Bamiléké people. Animism understands the world as inhabited by living presences beyond the human—spirits, forces, and ancestors that reside within natural elements such as trees, wind, water, and light. Within this worldview, the boundary between the visible and the invisible remains porous, and relationships between beings extend across time and states of existence.

Ancêtres (Ancestors) is an installation composed of 18 elements that engage directly with natural forces. Animated by the wind, they respond to and absorb the shifting expressions of their environment—sunlight, rain, birdsong, and even silence.

The pieces are made from Makoré, a wood native to Cameroon, and crafted using techniques rooted in Bamiléké traditions and the knowledge of so-called “sacred sculptors.”

The animist beliefs that inform this work are echoed in Birago Diop’s poem “Les morts ne sont pas morts” (The Dead Are Not Dead), which expresses the idea that life persists beyond death in multiple, unseen forms.The installation gives form to this belief, evoking the presence of an unseen world and the ongoing exchange between the living and the dead—a heritage that is both visible and invisible. Yet it also opens onto a broader question: does this heritage belong to one people alone?

Where, then, are our dead? Those we have grieved, those we grieve today, and those we will one day mourn?

Those who have died have never left;
They are in the shadow that brightens,
They are in the shadow that deepens…
The dead are not dead;
They are in the shadow that quivers;
They are in the wood that moans;
They are in the flowing water;
They are in the still water;
They are in the hut;
They are in the crowd…
The dead are not dead…

“The Dead Are Not Dead” by Birago Diop

© Mélissa Traoré: Sur le fil (On the Wire) 2026, Sculpture inspired by a vernacular motif from Ndop textiles of the Bamiléké culture (Cameroon), evoking the symbol of infinity and cycles. Metal armature, cotton, plaster, raffia, pigments (burnt sienna, iron oxide). 90 cm high, 80 cm wide, © Laurent Quinkal / © ADAGP, Paris

Following the reflections initiated in Ancêtres, where wood becomes a medium to evoke the presence of the invisible and the continuity between worlds, Sur le fil (On the Thread) extends this exploration through the language of textile and symbol.

The sculpture draws from a vernacular motif found in Ndop textiles of Bamiléké culture in Cameroon: a form resembling the infinity symbol, composed of a circle intersected by an ellipse. Within this tradition, it expresses a cyclical understanding of life—an endless movement of interwoven cycles, without clear beginning or end.

This concept is translated here into a sculptural form: a textile strip in the making, unfolding through space in a series of arabesque movements, as if a length of fabric were continuously unrolling. The piece is constructed around a metal armature, then covered with cotton and plaster, shaped by hand, tinted with pigments such as burnt sienna and iron oxide—colors that evoke the rich tones of Cameroonian soil—and interwoven in places with raffia.

Through this work, I explore how a cultural symbol can be embodied within sculpture, and how processes of translation, memory, and fragmentation are inscribed within the material itself. In dialogue with the concerns present in Ancêtres, the piece reflects on how gestures, symbols, and knowledge circulate, transform, and persist across time.

Sur le fil thus becomes a point of convergence between sculpture, weaving, and field research—drawing from anthropology and sociology—to create a space where gesture, material, memory, and contemporary form intersect. The title itself carries a double meaning: it refers both to the textile thread and to a fragile state of balance—being suspended on the thread of time, transmission, and possible disappearance.

“For several years, I have been developing Màari (meaning “to leave a trace of…” in Bambara), a research project dedicated to the memory of artisanal gestures, modes of transmission, and the relationships between material, territory, and narrative.”

© Mélissa Traoré: Passages, 2026: Immersive textile and video installation. Cotton, linen, hemp, raffia, natural dyes, and pigments. Three monumental textile strips: 4 × 2.20 m, © Laurent Quinkal / © ADAGP, Paris

Mélissa Traoré’s most recent work, Passages, is no less compelling. It emerges from a three-month immersion within a Bamiléké chiefdom, and forms part of the broader research project: “For several years, I have been developing *Màari* (meaning “to leave a trace of…” in Bambara), a research project dedicated to the memory of artisanal gestures, modes of transmission, and the relationships between material, territory, and narrative”, explains the artist.

Invited in 2023 by King Innocent Nayang Toukam to the Batoufam Chiefdom, she encountered a site that reveals itself progressively. The space unfolds through movement: courtyards leading to passages, corridors opening onto new thresholds, each transition framing another layer of meaning. Architecture, sculptures, paintings, and textiles form a network of signs that narrate the history, beliefs, and systems of transmission of a people.

What becomes central in Passages is not only what is seen, but how it is perceived—through fragmentation, movement, and gradual revelation. The installation reflects this experience. Textile surfaces, composed of cotton, linen, hemp, raffia, natural dyes, and pigments, function as thresholds where images appear and disappear. Light interacts with the woven structures, revealing, dissolving, and transforming what they hold.

At times, an unexpected proximity emerges between textile and digital image. Both are constructed through repetition—threads and pixels assembling into larger visual fields. The image becomes unstable, shifting and reconfiguring itself within the fabric.

Rather than opposing different materials or modes of transmission, Passages brings them into relation. Gestures, techniques, and visual languages intersect, overlap, and reshape one another. Like the chiefdom that inspired it, the work does not present itself all at once, but unfolds gradually, asking to be experienced through movement.

Mélissa Traoré’s artistic research, situated at the crossroads of sociology and anthropology, continues to unfold through lived experience and long-term immersion. This trajectory will extend to Senegal, where she will undertake a three-month residency in a fishing village, before pursuing this line of inquiry in the south of France. By moving between these contexts, her work seeks to connect cultures shaped by comparable economic conditions—particularly those influenced by climate change—and to observe how such realities transform daily life, gestures, and systems of knowledge.

Within this ongoing process, her works rarely assume the status of something finished. They remain open, evolving, and in dialogue with the people and environments from which they emerge. As she expresses it: “There are so many stories to be revealed, so many voices to be heard, that there is no sense of a finished work.”

Her approach also resists any form of artistic elitism. Art, in her view, must remain accessible—something that anyone can inhabit and develop. Every voice carries legitimacy, every experience holds the potential to be expressed. This conviction has been central to her work with incarcerated individuals, where, through a form of art therapy, she has facilitated the emergence of voices through gesture. These encounters, where expression precedes language, have become a fundamental point of departure in her artistic practice.

“The greatest inspiration I draw from my African homeland is their relationship to life; a kind of momentum in which one is always in the present. Art exists at that level: being connected to what is happening here and now. Even in our language, when we part, we say, ‘we are together.’”

When reflecting on what might be perceived as an inherently African relationship to life—one she finds deeply artistic—she evokes a particular sensibility: “The greatest inspiration I draw from my African homeland is their relationship to life; a kind of momentum in which one is always in the present. Art exists at that level: being connected to what is happening here and now. Even in our language, when we part, we say, ‘we are together.’”

In these words emerges a vision of art as an embodied presence, rooted in immediacy, connection, and continuity—a quiet yet profound celebration of humanity.

More about the artist:

website: https://melissatraore.com/

Instagram: @melissa_sira_traore

MÉLISSA TRAORÉ

Art Shaped by Memory and Inherited Gestures

ABOUT THE ARTIST

“I explore the role of craftsmanship in an industrialized world and pay tribute to forms of knowledge that have been rendered invisible.”

“For several years, I have been developing Màari (meaning “to leave a trace of…” in Bambara), a research project dedicated to the memory of artisanal gestures, modes of transmission, and the relationships between material, territory, and narrative.”

“The greatest inspiration I draw from my African homeland is their relationship to life; a kind of momentum in which one is always in the present. Art exists at that level: being connected to what is happening here and now. Even in our language, when we part, we say, ‘we are together.’”

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Like this:

MÉLISSA TRAORÉ

Art Shaped by Memory and Inherited Gestures

ABOUT THE ARTIST

“I explore the role of craftsmanship in an industrialized world and pay tribute to forms of knowledge that have been rendered invisible.”

“For several years, I have been developing *Màari* (meaning “to leave a trace of…” in Bambara), a research project dedicated to the memory of artisanal gestures, modes of transmission, and the relationships between material, territory, and narrative.”

“The greatest inspiration I draw from my African homeland is their relationship to life; a kind of momentum in which one is always in the present. Art exists at that level: being connected to what is happening here and now. Even in our language, when we part, we say, ‘we are together.’”

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“For several years, I have been developing Màari (meaning “to leave a trace of…” in Bambara), a research project dedicated to the memory of artisanal gestures, modes of transmission, and the relationships between material, territory, and narrative.”