The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Crépissage — Djenné, 1907

The base of the Great Mosque of Djenné, on the plain between the town and the Bani river, Mali

spring 1907 — the last weeks before the rains, the whole town of Djenné turned out at dawn to replaster the great mud mosque in a single morning, drums keeping the tempo, thousands of hands passing banco up the palm-beam scaffolding

A building remade by hand in a morning, by everyone who lives near it. This breach reads the BOY WITH THE BOWL at Djenné: the banco pits dug and trodden days before, the palm beams jutting from the walls as a permanent scaffold, the drums setting the tempo, the town's men and boys strung up the mosque in a living ladder passing mud from hand to hand. The witness is read only at the carrying and the climbing — the labor and the heat held softly in the background, the moment itself all belonging. The fragment is the subject's own: the mark their hands left in something far bigger than them, the work done shoulder to shoulder with people they knew by name — and the memory beneath it of a time they were small and were counted anyway, folded into a task that outlasted them.

From the record

the Great Mosque of Djenné is built of sun-dried mud brick and rendered in banco, a plaster of earth, water and rice husks, which the rains erode each year
bundles of palm wood, called toron, project permanently from the walls and serve as the scaffolding for the replastering
the banco is prepared in pits days in advance and trodden by boys and young men to work it smooth
the replastering, the crépissage, is done by the whole town before the rains, with the work organized by quarter and by age group
men and boys form ladders on the toron and pass the banco upward from hand to hand while drummers keep the tempo
the plastering of the great facade is completed in a single morning, and the building afterward stands smooth and uniformly brown

The era door

a low mud-brick doorway with a rough-hewn palm lintel, the plaster warm and grainy under your palm, the threshold worn into a shallow dish by feet

DJENNÉ — SPRING 1907

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037