Roberto Faidutti, La madre del fiore, 2022

LA MADRE DEL FIORE altoforno Matakam of Roberto faidutti witnesses the traditions of some African populations who retained primitive practices of iron processing, gathered from fallen meteorites.

In the Matakam village (in the north of Cameroon) there still were blacksmiths who remembered the practices and the rituals of fusion, connected to the fertility of their society: e.g. the production of the “flower” (iron clusters) was compared to conception and birth.

The photographic corpus used in this book, come from Roberto Faidutti’s archive: he travelled in Africa for thirty years.