Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography announced the opening of the call for applications for it’s 15th edition which will take place in Bamako, Mali, from 26 November 2026 to 26 January 2027.

Founded in 1994, the Bamako Encounters are the leading international event dedicated to contemporary African photography. The 2026 edition is organized by the Ministry of Handicrafts, Culture, Hotel Industry and Tourism of Mali, under the curatorial direction of Armelle Dakouo and the general delegation of El Hadj Amadou Diop.

The 15th edition is built around the theme REFABULATION(S), a curatorial proposition inviting artists to explore the narrative power of images and photography’s ability to generate alternative readings of the world.

The call for applications is currently open to photographers, filmmakers, visual artists and multidisciplinary creators from Africa, its diaspora and Afro-descendant communities. Selected projects will be integrated into the Biennale’s programme and associated exhibitions.

Alongside the call, they are actively seeking to strengthen collaborations with media organizations, cultural institutions, foundations, international organizations, private sector partners and professional networks interested in contemporary photography, visual culture and African creative industries.

Curatorial note
In an age of uncertainty how can we initiate a new relationship with a world undergoing changes. In his time Chinua Achebe already called upon the power of “refabulation” to fight cultural loss, alienation, assimilation. If “fabulation” can be defined as the invention of “imaginaries” moving away from reality, it can also be seen as a form of resistance that distances itself from dominant narratives. The power of ” refabulation” would then be a narrative strength in the uncertainties surrounding the international situation.

“Refabulating” paradoxically allows the building or creation of new possibilities. The inventiveness of “refabulations” increases the capacity to offer another reading of the world, to assume a critical thinking, to discover a different view point, to make up for the weaknesses, the absences or the lacks of the dominant narratives. They are an invitation extended to the artist photographers of the African continent, its diaspora and Afro descendants to address the issues we are concerned about and that affect us in order to extend the reflection upon the power of imagination through the creative force of plastician photography.

Photography “refabulates” such as litterature or cinema, but in a different way, through the images it offers, the moves it makes, the perspectives it draws up, the step backwards it achieves. It modifies the ways of seeing and considering things, with or without words. With their capacity of unveiling another image of our societies the artists plunge into the imaginary to eventually capture the real. Photography can sustain the multiplicity of narratives, show alternative routes by transforming our mental images, divert our ways of seeing from their ordinary course, by reinventing what is supposed to be known and by freeing them from their chains. In this way ” Refabulations” are matrixes of emancipation.

For their part how do photographers originally seize the narrative power and refabulation to intervene in their own way in lived experience? In the era of AI do images allow us to perceive things differently, more clearly?

By developing an endless variety of possibilities, photographic “refabulations” contribute by their plasticity, by the modification of our perceptions, by the creation of possibilities to the reestablishment of freedom. They revisit and extend stories which, for having been real, were not always ours. Above all they go beyond personal fiction and their statements are collective, these active fictions lead up to open societies, to infinities of peoples.

– Armelle Dakouo

Photo: Solie Morin.