Statues Also Breathe - 2022

Statues Also Breathe is the result of a collaboration between Prune Nourry and the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at Obafemi-Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in association with the families of the 276 high-school girls abducted by Boko Haram in Chibok, Nigeria on 14 April 2014. Some of them were able to flee or were freed in 2016–2017, thanks in particular to the international Bring Back Our Girls campaign, but 108 were still in the hands of their kidnappers when the project was drawn up.

Entrusted by some of the Chibok families with portraits of their missing daughters, Prune recreated the girls' faces in the form of eight clay heads, in the style of the sacred Ile-Ife terracotta (or bronze) heads representing the rulers of the Yoruba kingdoms and dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.