Lance-pierres sculptés d'Afrique de l'Ouest / West African Slingshots

Exhibition at the Musée des Explorations du monde, Cannes, 26 August 2025 - 2 November 2025

In West Africa, children and elders traditionally use slingshots to protect crops from voracious birds and other predators. But in this region of the world, within a limited territory (Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Mali), the slingshot is exceptional for its aesthetic appearance.

Neither quite a toy nor quite a weapon, it lends itself to the creativity of the sculptor and is adorned with wonderfully expressive symbolic and popular representations: human or animal figures, masked characters, objects of power, often humorous evocations of a proverb or a situation.

Through a selection of 80 slingshots, this exhibition catalogue invites visitors to discover these everyday masterpieces, still little known in the West, and the peoples and cultures that produced them.