I was born in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and that is where my work is rooted. My family belongs to the Toussian people, with deep ties to the western region around Bobo-Dioulasso. I move today between Ouagadougou and Atlanta, but the Sahel remains the soil my practice grows from. Everything I make carries the dust, the light, and the memory of that land.

My first memory is the sound of metal being worked. As a child in Ouagadougou, I was fascinated by the forgerons and artisans who came from Bobo-Dioulasso, men who shaped objects with a precision that felt almost ceremonial. I would stop and watch them for hours. The rhythm of the hammer, the way fire transformed a flat sheet into something alive, the patience and silence of the gesture — that was my first encounter with what I would later understand as art. Before I had any vocabulary for it, I already knew that making something with your hands was a serious thing, almost sacred.

Yes. I have never really known another life. Even as a child, I was drawing, building, and taking things apart to understand how they were made. I went to ENSCI Paris in the early 2000s, and I founded Studio Hamed Ouattara more than thirty years ago. Design has not been a choice in the sense of a career path. It has been the only language I knew how to speak fluently.

What led me to design was a need to answer back. I grew up surrounded by objects that did not belong to us, objects imported from elsewhere, often badly suited to our lives, our climate, our gestures. At the same time, I was surrounded by an extraordinary visual culture — the architecture of Djenné and Bobo-Dioulasso, the textiles, the masks, the rhythm of the markets. I felt very early that something was missing: a contemporary African object that took itself seriously, that did not apologize, that spoke from here rather than imitating elsewhere. Design became my way of building that object.

I do not feel I belong to a single existing movement, and I have come to think of my practice as part of a contemporary African design that is still writing its own definition. If I had to place it in dialogue with existing categories, I would say it stands at the intersection of sculptural design, post-colonial material practice, and what could be called a design of refondation: a design that rebuilds, on our own terms, the relationship between matter, heritage, and contemporary life. The label matters less to me than the conversation.

My first influences were anonymous: the forgerons and builders of Sahelian architecture, whose names history did not record but whose intelligence is everywhere in the region. Among named designers, I have a deep respect for Charlotte Perriand for her sense of structure and her dialogue with non-Western cultures, for Pierre Jeanneret for his rigor and his Indian period, and for Jean Prouvé for his honesty with materials. I also feel close to the spirit of African builders and sculptors who were never called designers but who held that intelligence entirely.

I follow with great interest the work of my peers represented by Friedman Benda and of other galleries working at the edge between art and design. I am particularly attentive to contemporary African designers and to the new generation emerging from Lagos, Dakar, Abidjan, Casablanca, and Ouagadougou. The conversation has shifted in the last decade, and there is now a real chorus rather than a few isolated voices.

I am inspired by writers and thinkers as much as by visual artists. The novels of Yambo Ouologuem and Ahmadou Kourouma shaped my sense of African voice. In contemporary visual art, the work of El Anatsui has been a deep reference for what can be done with the discarded and the everyday. I also draw a lot from cinema, particularly the films of Souleymane Cissé and Idrissa Ouedraogo, for their sense of pace and silence.