Fatim Soumaré is a Senegalese visual artist and researcher born in 1989 in Senegal and based in the Sine-Saloum region. Through her weaving practice, Fatim Soumaré initiates both real and symbolic encounters between women on the African continent who carry on the weaving tradition. An ancestral gesture and bearer of memory, weaving becomes in her work a common language and a tool for recounting narratives, a metaphor for both physical and social bonds. She is particularly interested in the history of the cotton tree, its pre-colonial journey across the African continent, the vernacular practices that stem from it, and its later industrial exploitation.  

From Senegal to Tunisia, via Morocco and Cape Verde, the artist explores the legacy of the triangular trade and the links between geographical areas resulting from trans-Saharan trade, establishing a contemporary map of the survival of cotton customs and traditions. Nevertheless, her work and practice are truly rooted in the Sin region of Senegal. In 2021, she founded Falé, a laboratory-workshop where more than 200 Serer artisan spinners from the villages of Fayil, Ndérane, Simal, Diofior, Fa Sakhor, and Mar Lodj in the Fatick region work. This socio-artistic initiative aims to preserve a traditional skill: the tradition of hand-spinning rain-fed cotton. Soumaré has developed a collective, participatory approach, intervening at every stage of the process, from seed to production of the works, including the transmission of knowledge.

Biomorphic, Fatim Soumaré's works are inspired as much by plant forms, such as the organic tubular structures of trees or cocoons, as by the headdresses of Senegalese women. In the evolving work Living Salts (2024-2025), she sets out in search of the earliest traces of cotton on the African continent, the first of which date back to ancient times. This monumental work, like others, cascades from the ceiling and takes root in the ground, recalling the earthly connection of the material and re-establishing cosmogonic links, while its vines expose the raw fibres of the cotton. Regarding this work, exhibition curator Camille Lévy-Sarfati writes:  "Living Salts recounts the artist's quest along the caravan route: a quest to restore indigenous African weaving practices and, through them, the lost connection across the continent. At each stage of her research, the artist gathers objects, collects stories and enables the development of a common language: weaving." The works become receptacles for these encounters and learnings.

The notion of repair and care is also at work in her approach. The white gold makeshift bed (2021) represents a monochrome bed containing numerous balls of cotton wound around themselves. Echoing the maternal envelope and a space for rest, the work not only evokes the extraction and exploitation of this plant fibre as an economic driver and means of enslavement, but also prompts reflection on the intimate space as a place of alienation. 

Through her works, Fatim Soumaré restores weaving's protective role and cotton's potential for resistance in the face of history and colonial and industrial domination. Her work becomes as much a collective space for storytelling as it is for opposition and reparation.