Ivory Coast
Impressions from Abidjan

Building a new platform - at the AFRICOMICS workshop in Abidjan, 14 participants took part successfully. The workshop was led by Roland Polman from Ivory Coast and Mikaël Ross from Germany. As the workshop showed the lack of networking platforms in the Ivory Coast, the workshop participants decided to meet regularly at the Goethe-Institut Côte d'Ivoire to create their own platform called "Bulle".

The workshop facilitators

© Roland Polman Roland Polman is a press artist and journalist. He has more than ten years of experience in journalism and comics. Roland is currently the managing director of "Crayons et compagnie", a creative agency specialized in drawing, writing and design to communicate and raise awareness. He is also the co-founder of "Le neuf info", a news magazine made of cartoons and comics distributed through social networks. Roland holds two master's degrees in journalism and law.
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© Darjush Davar An avid comic reader and cartoonist from an early age, Mikaël Ross only came to the Ninth Art in a roundabout way. Born in Munich in 1984, he initially trained as a theater cutter at the Bavarian State Opera. Moving to Berlin and studying at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee influenced his first longer story "Herrengedeck," which he self-published in 2008. During a year abroad at the Brussels School of Bande Dessinée, ESA Saint-Luc in Brussels, he meets the Belgian scenarist and draftsman Nicolas Wouters. They shared a fascination for punk and subculture. Together, the two wrote and drew the graphic novel "Les pieds dans le béton" (2013), which immerses its two restless protagonists in the Berlin squatter scene of the eighties. The book was published in 2014 under the title "Lauter Leben!" by Avant-Verlag. After two years of research in Neuerkerode, the cartoonist dares a change of perspective with his graphic novel "Der Umfall" (2018), and tells from Noel's point of view about the lows and highs of a young man with an intellectual disability. For this he received the Max & Moritz Award for the "Best German-language Comic" in 2020.
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