POTTERY SCHOOL

In the mid-1940s, a Frenchman named Pierre Lods, an amateur painter and World War II Resistance fighter, accompanied the Ogooué-Congo mission. Enchanted by the country and its people, Lods didn't return and settled in Brazzaville. He soon gathered together a group of talented friends and self-taught painters, opened his studio to them and defined a method of learning, without any artistic rules: to provide students with the minimum technical support so as not to break the spontaneity and creativity of expression. This school, which wasn't really a school at all, became a matrix for artistic creation, enjoying dazzling success in the 1950s, culminating in exhibitions at New York's MoMA in 1955 and 1956, and the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. In 2021, the Ecole de Poto-poto celebrated its 70th anniversary with a series of painting-related events. Surrounded by majestic trees, the sloping-roofed hut with its slender silhouette still stands on the Moungali traffic circle. Now renovated, it houses a permanent exhibition of the school's painters. You can bump into them at any time, and it's often one of the "masters" present who will act as your guide for the visit; they often come to work in the shade of the low-slung roof, or to teach the young people of the 6^th generation. Between gallery and museum, calm and shady, the Ecole de Poto-Poto site thumbs its nose at the hustle and bustle of the traffic circle it backs onto. An institution not to be missed.