#2 Districts and Memories: Com-plot-er Dakar

© Anna Diagne

Conversation with Germaine Acogny (choreographer), Viyé Diba (artist) and Prof. Abdoulaye Elimane Kane (philosopher). Moderated by Vydia Tamby (cultural advisor to the Mayor of Dakar & co-founder of Editions Vives Voix)

Event date: May 7th, 5pm

COM-PLOT-ER DAKAR

How collective art spaces create bonds of solidarity where the conventional routes are blocked?

In Dakar, what ambitions shape contemporary artistic practices?

Can they develop the tools needed to inhabit the city and live better together?

This series of discussions explores how collectives and independent spaces invent ways of acting together where official structures recede.

Panel 1 Ruptures in the Plateau: Exiting the Temple

Neighbourhood: Plateau / Fann Hock

This panel, featuring Germaine Acogny, Professor Abdoulaye Elimane Kane, and Viyé Diba, addresses the transition from the state monument to the artist’s spatial strategy. It frames the series through the foundational rupture marked by the transformation of the Musée Dynamique into a courthouse and the end of art as an instrument of state prestige, exploring how, in the face of this institutional void, the artist became their own architect.

For Viyé Diba, the discussion will focus on his theorization of reclaimed materials as an aesthetic of presence in conditions of scarcity. He will be asked whether the loss of the Temple and the Museum was a necessary liberation for Senegalese art to discover its own material language.

Germaine Acogny will be invited to reflect on how, with Mudra Afrique embedded within the monument, the body became the primary territory of sovereignty as institutional walls closed in.

Professor Kane will address the philosophical implications of the shift from Senghor’s cultural policy of the Universal toward a logic of survival and transition.