Terracotta heads highlight Nigeria's missing girls

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STORY: In a white-walled room, rows of sculpted faces stare into the distance.

These are clay heads of 108 Nigerian girls who are still missing, eight years after being abducted by insurgents from the north eastern town of Chibok.

The artwork, titled "Statues Also Breathe", was conceived by French artist Prune Nourry and is on display in Lagos.

She was touring a previous piece in 2014 when she heard about the abduction from Chibok.

"Eight years later they are still missing, some are still missing and we still need to talk about it because it is a universal, global struggle and symbol."

Boko haram militants abducted around 270 teenagers from a school in Chibok in 2014.

The mass kidnapping initially prompted worldwide outrage. About 160 of the girls have since been released, but the story has faded from the headlines.

Habiba Balogun is coordinator of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign in Lagos.

"I'm really happy that a project like this have come up that is really going to elevate the level of discourse and understanding, and even almost like have a permanent record in the history of this, our country, about something tragic like this."

Nourry collected photos of the missing girls from their families.

They were then passed to 108 students, one for each head, who created the sculptures at a one-day workshop in the southwestern city Ife.

A small group of women who were among the abducted girls, and had been later released, also took part.

As did some parents of the missing women.

"For the students, for all of us who felt so useless when something so incredible happened and you cannot do anything about it, the fact of being able to at least give a little thing through sculptures, through what we know how to do, was healing."

The young artists took inspiration from the photographs of the Ife heads.

They are terracotta sculptures made in the region centuries ago and considered to be among the country's most significant cultural artefacts.

Clay from Ife was used - a substance that, according to the Yoruba's ethnic group's creation myth, was used to form humans.

Nourry said the sculptures will be taken on a global tour.

She then hopes they will be bought by a collector and donated to a public museum in Africa.

All the money made from the work will go to a non-profit foundation to finance arts and education in Nigeria.