Club Ivoire

An archive of nightclub exteriors in Côte d'Ivoire, featuring a sumptuous vegan leather cover, ribbons, pullout poster maps and more

Over the course of ten days in 2023, French photographer François Prost (born 1980) rode his bicycle across highways and dirt roads in the regions of Abidjan, Grand Bassam and Yamoussoukro. He had a mission: to photograph as many nightclub facades in the daylight as he could find. Following his “visual inventories” of nightlife spaces in France and America, Club Ivoire presents, across several hundred images, a unique tour of the Ivorian coast, underscoring its graphic sensibilities and cultural aspirations. Many of the clubs assume the form of concrete cubes, perhaps painted in an eye-popping red or yellow; others feature sharp edges and oblique angles. Some are named after famed sites in New York or Europe, such as Times Square or Mont Blanc; others take their names from digital platforms, such as TikTok or YouTube.