BIIGA MOSSI doll; Burkina Faso, first half of the 20th century.

BIIGA MOSSI doll; Burkina Faso, first half of the twentieth century.
Wood.
Attached original silver gelatin photograph by Ann Münchow with stamp on the back.
Provenance: private collection Düsseldorf / Hans-Rolf Kalde collection (1950 - 2013,
Aachen / Galerie Kamer, Paris.
Measurements: 21 x 4.5 x 3 cm.
MOSSI, "biiga" fertility doll, pre-1950, acquired by its owner in Paris, mid-1950s, from Henri Kamer and Helene Leloup. Attached original silver gelatin photograph by Ann Münchow (Germany 1923 -2019) with stamp on the back "FOTO ANN BREDOLLEPPER AACHEN HAUS NUELLENS", stamp used by the photographer until 1958.
"Biiga" means child in Moré. A Mossi girl receives a biiga as a child. Subsequently, she gives it to her husband to become a mother and takes care of this "wooden child" as if it were a real child. At birth, she takes precedence over the fetus: she receives the first drop of milk, is washed and anointed before the biological child is born.

In this type of magical and religious objects of traditional Africa, nothing is left to chance and everything, down to the smallest detail, responds to a coded and initiatory language, whose reading is not available to all individuals of the cultural group for which they have been conceived, but often only to the most experienced initiates, the elders who have gone through the various stages of training, of initiation. If there is a common thread that allows us to travel through Africa through its artistic creations, that thread is that of a concept as intangible and unreal as that of magic, conceived as the path to follow for the control of supernatural forces and for the understanding of Nature. As part of this attempt to understand the natural and control the supernatural, in Africa, as in practically all pre-industrial societies, instruments suitable for the management of certain energies appear, sometimes in the form of a mask, sometimes in the form of a sculpture, or a fetish, or a conglomerate of elements, sometimes just a stone placed horizontally or a line drawn on the ground.