Balle de Match

At the crossroad  of documentary and fiction, Mbaye Diop focused his research on Dakar’s architecture and urbanism during his two-months residency at Selebe Yoon. While he is working in Switzerland since 2018, the socio-economic evolution of his native country, Senegal and its relationship to the West remain at the center of his practice.

Dakar - a city of contrast, torn between its future dreams and the traces of history, Mbaye Diop conceives it as a site where power structures are at play. Its urban fabric reveal architectural confrontations between models inflicted by colonial history, the persistence of traditional forms and the proliferation of new symbols of globalization.

Mbaye Diop makes us roam through a city inhabited by its contradictions, its submission to concrete, its past fantasies, and the ineluctable return of urban entropy. As visitors discover historical buildings through his works that are either vanished, threatened or for the time being, honoured, a series of different mediums unfold: from animated films, drawings to paintings, the artist interweaves the physicality of drawing with stop-motion technology.

His animated films are made out of thousands of drawings in black and white renderings, produced out of videos that he decomposes into photographs, each transferred with acetone on paper and re-worked with graphite. Page after page, the artist allows silhouettes and details to emerge and reveals the evanescent character of the action and the urban uproar; the ghostly quality of the depicted scenes and individuals. In his paintings and drawings, the artist scribbles and composes his figures out of repeated scrawls made with lead pencil and for the first time colour pigments.

Along the same line as his predecessors that took urban life as the starting point of a visual reflection, such as filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty with  Contras City” (1969) or  Bouna Médoune Sèye with his photographs « Les Trottoirs de Dakar » (1992), Mbaye Diop depicts a “désarchitecture” of the city, a disorganized aesthetic, and the coexistence of various codes and systems.

From Colobane market to that of Kermel, from colonial buildings to old houses; the streets of Plateau to those of Medina, his works offer a vision on spaces of sociability and of urban excess that bury colonial and post-colonial projects under the economic and political reality of today. Metal shelters, constructions in decay, traditional housings  appear in his works. All evoke “architectures of survival that grow like parasite plants that cling onto a tree in full growth”  according to the artist, and produce counter-balancing forces against new urban rules.

For him, the construction of the city resembles a game that opposes multiple rivals. Therefore, the image of the tennis game is found across his œuvre to echo the competitive state that inhabits the city. A game whose ending is close but that will irrevocably raise questions: will homogeneity triumph? Can multiple modes of living continue to coexist? What will the voices of those that we cannot hear say?

All the works in the exhibition have been created during his two-months residency at Selebe Yoon, except for “Colobane” (2020). The exhibition also presents a work in progress as to display the production process of a future animated film. Finally, an archival room is dedicated to the architecture of Dakar.

A performance between the musician Wasis Diop and Mbaye Diop is scheduled to take place on December 15, 2022.

-Jennifer Houdrouge

Text copyright: Selebe Yoon