Art and Community

One Sunday afternoon, Vivian Bauer (a good friend and Watson fellow that I had met the previous day) and I went for swim at Kebra Beach in Praia where I ended up conducting an impromptu sand sculpture workshop with a group of Cape Verdean youth.

It all started when Rodriguez, one of the young men saw me making a human head from the sand, got intrigued, and asked if he could join. Moments later his friends gathered around, helped digging wet sand for delicate details, while we warmly exchanged questions about where we were from and what we were visiting Cape Verde for and learned about their life in the archipelagos.

It was a beautiful moment of art and cultural exchange.

Posed with Nepalese painter and printmaker Aman Marjan during the opening of his solo exhibition Homage.

Coffee break and dialogue with Tibetan Buddhist Monks at Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu, Nepal. This was during a two-week long silent retreat, in which I also enrolled in an intensive training that explored links between empirical findings on the human mind and Buddhist teachings.

_art and faith

Dedicated to collecting and preserving tradtional Khmer art and crafts, Theam, who is also a national and internationally recognized Cambodian artist, walked me through his life journey from a turbulent childhood under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, young adulthood in exile in France, and his return to his home country where he built a large collection of Khmer traditional art and crafts, an art gallery, and a social hub in Siem Reap. Theam art gallery hires over 150 women from rural Cambodia

I visited the studio, gallery, and home of Micheal Adams, one of the fore-faces of visual art in Seychelles. I had an honor to interview Micheal in the company of his spouse and daughter Alyssa Adams who is also a painter, same as his brother Tristan Adams currently based in London. After the chat, Alyssa and his mother gave a tour of the Adams's little heaven, where I enjoyed seeing rare species of plants and flowers including two huge Baobab trees, their poultry, and later explored Micheal Adams studio.

Olivier visited the Blue Art Center in Siem Reap where I met and chatted with its founder Svay Sareth and his spouse Yim Maline. They are both nationally and internationally recognized artists.

Svay believes that it was his moral responsibility as an artist to give back to his community and country. Hence, with his colleagues, he has opened an art school in Battambang in 1994 and the Blue Art Center (pictured here) in 2022, as a commitment to his conviction. The schools offer free art education to passionate and promising Cambodian youth.

In each country that Olivier visited, he thoroughly examined how emerging and well-established artists of different ages, backgrounds, and specializations, utilize their work and platforms to uplift their communities.

As part of the process, he explored private and public art venues such as studios, art galleries, schools, and museums, where he also conducted and documented interviews with dozens of artists, activists, educators, and other social and cultural actors. Moreover, he partook in music festivals, art exhibition openings, creative workshops, open mics, studio recording sessions, and formal and informal dialogues about history, healing, art, and the power and responsibilities of artists in addressing and resolving contemporary issues and past injustices.

Additionally, Olivier invested in learning local languages, read about major historical and geopolitical realities, and thanks to living and daily interacting with the local population, he gained a better understanding of local customs and traditions.

Jordanian painter Nasser AbdelWahab Saleh Kharma and his daughter Mira who is also an artist.

Olivier posed in front of his painting work, urusobe (complexity) while holding his sculpture work Human Nature (kamere muntu). Photo by Buck Butler

While in Dakar, I met M.K.O ( Meufs ki Ose which means women who dare) Collective, a group of grafitti female artists and dancers from Reunion Island. MKO collectif focus their work to mobilizing and empowering young women through grafitti and dance and by providing safe educational spaces.