Senegal Art and Entertainment Is It Safe to Go to Senegal
Who Needs Canvas? In Dakar, Street Artists Express Their Visions on Sides of Homes
DAKAR, Senegal — On one wall, the painting of a marabout, a Muslim holy human, peers out from backside a line hung with laundry. Nearby, a poster of an African woman in a bustle has been pasted to a house. Even so further forth, women socialize in front of a wall covered in an intricate black-and-white abstruse pattern.
These are the painted houses of the Médina, a poor and working-class neighborhood well-nigh downtown Dakar. The neighborhood has welcomed street artists from all over the globe to do their craft in what the founder of the project calls the open up heaven museum. Dozens of wall paintings dot the neighborhood, bringing colour to usually drab cement walls, and calculation to the flourishing international fine art scene in Dakar.
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Artists from not just Senegal but Burkina Faso, Algeria, Morocco, Congo, French republic and Italia have come to paint on these walls. They in plough accept brought fine art lovers and tourists into a neighborhood where they otherwise might not get, to mingle with people they otherwise might not see.
The wall art of the Médina "can bring together people who normally don't even see each other," said Mauro Petroni, a ceramist who has lived in Dakar for many years.
Street art seems to come naturally to Senegal, where many small-scale shops are adorned with images of what they sell. Paintings of pair of scissors signify tailors; heads with fancy hairstyles advertise barbers; images of cows and bowls of milk herald the ubiquitous sweet milk shops; a drawing of a sheep broadcasts the presence of a vendor serving grilled meat.
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Store art is commissioned by the shop owners, and sometimes painted by them too. But to paint on a house in the Médina neighborhood, it helps to go through Mamadou Boye Diallo, known equally Modboye.
Mr. Diallo, 31, was built-in and raised in the Médina, the son of an lift operator. He dropped out of school at 15 to get a interruption dancer and rollerblader. He got to know the art scene past working as a messenger, delivering fliers on roller blades for art galleries.
In 2010, he created Yataal Art, a nonprofit arts collective, and painted the first wall in the Médina with friends. The beauty of it is that "you don't take to have a dainty shower and wear perfume" to see the art, Mr. Diallo said. Among street artists seeking a wall to paint on, Mr. Diallo became the human being to run into.
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"Yous have to laissez passer by him in order to work in the Médina," one of the street artists, Doline Legrand Diop, said. "He functions a bit like a curator."
Ms. Legrand Diop lived in Dakar for many years and has two children by a Senegalese human, though she now lives in France. Her pictures of black people dressed every bit aristocrats, her #remakehistory project, can be seen on the walls of the Médina.
In the beginning, it was not always easy to convince homeowners to let people paint on their walls.
"They wanted money," Mr. Diallo said. But as the project defenseless on, they wanted to keep up with their neighbors.
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"It'south for the community," said Tonton Kaba, a retired chauffeur, who has a Legrand Diop collage on his firm.
Abdoulaye Camara, known equally Père Djim, immune an artist to paint the discussion "suba," Wolof for tomorrow, on his house. He makes furniture of wood and animate being horns on the street in the Médina, home to many artisans, and then he could relate.
Nonetheless, what residents expect and what artists deliver are non e'er the same thing. Giacomo Bufarini, an Italian artist who goes by the fine art proper name Run, painted the wall of a house with a giant silhouette of the woman who lived in that location. He incorporated a window into her head, similar a window into her mind.
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Rather than being impressed by the concept, she complained that he had left the peeling paint on the window frame. "I told her I'yard not like a decorator," Mr. Bufarini recalled, sounding both peeved and guilty.
Another creative person, Ernesto Novo, had to tiptoe effectually a large balderdash while he painted a row of African statuettes onto a wall terminal March. The animal is still there (as is the art).
The spirit of the open sky gallery is improvisational, only similar the lives of many of the artists. Traveling through Due west Africa from France, an creative person called the Wa, who would non requite his real name, wound up in Senegal by accident, after his visa expired in Islamic republic of mauritania, and he and his friends drove to Senegal "for a beer."
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Mr. Bufarini recalled that afterward finishing his painting, he, Mr. Diallo and friends celebrated by going for a fish barbecue on the embankment. Having no barbecue, they cooked on refrigerator racks scavenged from the trash, after called-for off the plastic coating.
The painted-houses project has gotten so big that this yr, Delphine Buysse, a Belgian curator, has arranged for artists in residence to live at a luxury hotel in Dakar, the Pullman, for a week, while painting in the Médina.
One of the most contempo wall paintings was a collaboration between Kouka Ntadi, a Congolese-French creative person, and Barkinado Bocoum, a Senegalese artist. Mr. Ntadi painted abstruse portraits in black-and-white, and Mr. Bocoum added folksier portraits in bright colors.
Mr. Ntadi loved sharing the neighborhood with the commercial artists of the barbershops and the milk stores.
"I would say there is not really a border between the two in Africa," he said. "It's not like in France or the U.S. where at that place is a snobbism about art, and y'all tin't be in marketing. So for certain, we tin nevertheless exist an artist and make a pattern for a bottle of milk or a side of beef."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/world/africa/dakar-senegal-street-art.html
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