Rethinking Performance As Archive Through The Practice of El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb
In 2012, the Senegalese government sold the site of the former Lat Dior military camp in Dakar to private investors.[1] This campement, situated on the capital’s rugged Atlantic coast, is a geographical site that serendipitously sets the stage for the issues at hand in my discussion. For it has not only been home to barracks and the foundations of future palatial villas and their swimming pools but in 1980 was squatted by the young local artist El Hadji Sy as the city’s art village, or Village des arts as it became commonly known. Sy and his peers were evicted in 1983, the Senegalese army literally bulldozing the legacy of that fertile creative period into the ground. Over fifteen years later on the eve of the new millennium, the government began planning the construction of a national library and archive centre at Lat Dior, but the project never came to fruition. Then in the spring of 2012, the rumours that President Abdoulaye Wade’s government had moved the site to an industrial area near Dakar’s port were confirmed, and the land sale was revealed in the dizzy hangover of the country’s presidential elections. The notebooks and canvases of the artists who participated in the first opus of the Village des arts will never be salvaged. Much of the work that took place during the early years of the Village’s existence was multi-disciplinary; different mediums came together in workshops that led to the creation of performances of which there is little trace today. The principal grouping of artists to operate in the Village is known as the Laboratoire Agit’Art. In this thesis I will explore the relationship that the Laboratoire, in particular two of its long-standing members El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb, have had to the archival process.[2] I will argue that by shifting the focus from the lack of conventional documentary material on their work to the way that they use their bodies and art objects as vehicles of knowledge transmission and negotiation, it is possible to understand their practice in a new way. The Lat Dior camp becomes thus a metaphor and physical manifestation of the tension between performance and the archive, within both the context of Senegal’s littoral zone and global art-world discourses.
El Hadji Sy standing in front of the stage design he created for ‘Plehanov 7, les cendres de Pierre Lods’ (‘Plehanov 7, the Ashes of Pierre Lods’), 19 January 1990, Théâtre de Verdure du Centre Culturel Français de Dakar. Courtesy of Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Collection Axt/Sy.
Much has been said on the apparent unreadability of the Laboratoire’s work, in the form of outside criticism and as a rebuttal from within the collective. Clémentine Deliss, a key collaborator and member of the Laboratoire since the 1990s has warned that investigation into their work runs the risk of crystallising the commodification of what she describes as ‘alternative theories of knowledge production’.[3] In defence of this paper, I propose that commodification of certain modes of practice is not what is at stake here, but rather the proffering of a perspective that will add to the richness of possible translations of the Laboratoire’s work. To hermetically seal the history of the Laboratoire is to position knowledge in a hierarchy, and to deny the very performativity of its transmission as practiced, in my opinion, by Sy and Samb. Furthermore, observing the growth of interest in these two artists in Europe, it becomes even more pressing to open up a dialogue around the various interpretations of their work.[4]
I will begin with a discussion of the term ‘archive’, to frame the way that I will employ it throughout this paper, before moving on to consider how archives were used in President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s post-independence nation-building project in Senegal. I will then trace the birth and development of the Laboratoire as a response to Senghor’s cultural policy, using their ideological leanings to underpin a discussion on certain key performances that exemplify the artists’ performed and embodied archival approach.
Issa Samb during an impromptu performance in his studio. Dakar, 2016. Photo by / Courtesy of Amy Sall
The archive, its position in post-independence Senegalese history and the birth of the Laboratoire Agit’Art.
In mainstream discourse, definitions of the archive generally revolve around the principle of organising source-based knowledge, with a particular focus on the material document. Jacques Derrida has noted that the etymology of the term has been traced to the Greek arkheion, pertaining to the house of lawmakers, imbuing the term with a paternalistic function.[5] This is made all the more explicit when considering the way that societies have attempted to shape and control readings of history through attempts at organising its sources.[6] Taking the example of African history, the written and therefore more often than not exogenous source has largely superseded spoken word as the dominant vehicle for historical study, to the deliberate detriment of local claims for sovereignty. In reaction to the hierarchical way in which archives have been conceived of and developed, the second half of the twentieth century saw subjugated communities exploring alternative archives to contest power dynamics founded in one-sided historical narratives. In the post-colonial context, subaltern studies emerged as an entire discipline, and in the United Kingdom and America minority groups instigated new archival projects, such as Arthur Alphonso Schomberg’s African American Library[7] and Eddie Chambers’ African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive.[8] It is important to note that whilst the affirmation of multiple identities and histories through a reinvigorated investment of the archive has gone a long way in aiding processes of emancipation, methodological techniques continue to uphold asymmetries with regards to the way that knowledge is understood to be communicated. Rebecca Schneider points out that although oral histories are now deemed to have a legitimate place in the archive, technological material in the form of recordings continues to be predominant over attempts at thorough and sustained engagement with the way that bodies perform orality, demonstrating an enduring hierarchy of archival form that works against non-Western modes of knowledge transmission.[9] The materiality of the document is privileged over the materiality of the body. It is this latter, alternative form of archive, enacted through performance, embodiment and action, that I wish to draw upon.
Tensions between documentation and embodied action are particularly pertinent when considering performance art and its connotations of ephemerality. The question of the archive has in itself been central to the development of strategies for categorising performance in the arts, as highlighted by Peggy Phelan’s oft-cited statement that performance ‘becomes itself through disappearance’.[10] More recent writing by Sven Lütticken grapples with the assumption, put forward by Phelan, that performance is inherently anti-capitalist and radical because it has been historically difficult to commodify in market terms.[11] I share with Lütticken and many other scholars a frustration with the notion that performance can be by default aligned with any one political standpoint, namely anti-capitalism, and it is vital to dig deeper to establish how different performance artists have navigated the territory between body, movement, ephemerality and material traces. This is an increasingly rich field of study, and in recent years there have been a growing number of exhibitions that take as their subject matter the way that ephemeral performance may interact with objects, pointing to a widespread concern with how knowledge produced during performance may be documented and passed on.[12]
Diana Taylor has written extensively on this, largely in the context of Latin American performance and history.[13] Her study provides a useful framework that can be extended to an analysis of Sy and Samb’s practice, allowing a richer examination of their methods than one that would consider only the material detritus and documentation of their work. Taylor identifies the ‘repertoire’ as a useful way of encapsulating the worthiness of performance as a means of engaging with knowledge, suggesting that we absolutely use bodies as sites upon and within which this engagement takes place.[14] She aligns her thesis with that of Joseph Roach, who in his book Cities of the Dead points to embodied action as ‘mnemonic reserves’.[15] By consequence, in contrast to Phelan Taylor argues that there is much in performance that does not disappear. There is however an inherent danger of reductionism when embarking on such a prioritisation of the body in non-Western performance, as pointed out by Coco Fusco. Following on from her performances of Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit… (1992 - 1994, with Guillermo Gómez-Peña) Fusco wrote about the culturally embedded tradition in European and American history of deeming Otherness and performance to be inextricably linked, allowing for the objectifying Western gaze to settle easily on the body of the Other.[16] The need therefore to continue re-examining and exploring embodied practice, incorporating theoretical, historical, and critical frameworks alongside artist statements, is a preoccupation that underpins my discussion on Sy and Samb’s work.
If arguing for a revaluation of Sy and Samb’s approach to the archive, it is important therefore to acknowledge the historical precedent in Senegal which the two artists would go on to collapse. Under President Léopold Sédar Senghor, following independence from France the Republic of Senegal was imagined through the prism of négritude. In short, for Senghor négritude signified the existence of a specific African cultural identity shared by Black communities across the world.[17] The negation of local culture under the French colonial model of universalisme meant that at the moment of the country’s independence different claims were being made with regards to the reconstruction of a Senegalese, or even pan-African, history. Senghor instrumentalised a system of state-sponsored art making and the production of art objects to build his version of such a history, founded in his vision of négritude.[18] Dakar’s architecture for example was seen by former Minister of Culture Alioune Sene as a way for négritude art to conjoin with life, and artworks created at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the Manufactures sénégalaises des arts décoratifs were displayed in Senegalese government offices and embassies across the globe (fig. 1).[19] The overarching role of the state in Senegalese artistic creation from the years 1960 to 1980, corresponding to Senghor’s presidential rule, can be read as the patriarchal construction of a certain historical narrative in line with Derrida’s concerns outlined above. By the late 1960s however fractures were emerging amongst artists, not all of whom subscribed to Senghor’s ideology and who would challenge the primacy of the art object and its top-down political function in Senegal.
Fig 1. Woman Pounding, 1968 by Modou Niang. Tapestry
Fig 2. La Marche, 1978 by El hadji Sy. Oil on canvas. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, Edited by. C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015.
It is within this local context that the Laboratoire Agit’Art came into being. Samb talks about burning his landscape paintings that had been selected by Senghor to represent the country in 1974 at Paris’ Grand Palais.[20] This was a clear act of rebellion against the co-optation of his art for Senghor’s political agenda, in line with Walter Benjamin’s anxieties about revolutionary themes being assimilated into the ‘bourgeois apparatus of production’.[21] This was not an isolated case of creative agitation; it is useful to remember that the end of the 1960s and the 1970s was a period of political and aesthetic agitation across the globe. What’s more the May 1968 student protests in France were echoed the same year in Dakar when revolts against the university system grew into a larger uprising.[22] In close relation to these political events, aesthetic revolutions were also taking place on the African continent; in Morocco Souffles magazine became a reference point for post-colonial linguistic upheaval and in Kenya Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was initiating his anti-bourgeois theatrical practice, to name just two examples from different corners of the continent. In Senegal, the 1966 Festival mondial des arts nègres showcased the ideological stranglehold of state-sponsored art in the country, fostered through the art school system. In the wake of events described above a loose grouping of artists, politicians and intellectuals, the Laboratoire was according to most accounts formed in 1974 in part as a reaction to what they deemed as Senghor’s social, political and aesthetic shortcomings.[23] Sy and Samb were some of the group’s first members, and by the late 1970s were based at the Lat Dior Village des arts. Joanna Grabski has underlined the significance of the Lat Dior location for the Laboratoire; their deliberate displacement from institutional sites of artistic practice shows not only a geographical but also an ideological distancing from the state.[24] This refusal to enter into relation with the state during the early years of the Laboratoire’s existence is particularly relevant in light of my earlier discussion of the state’s control over paths of production and exhibition. It demonstrates an attempt to pull away from the force field of the state’s cultural power, where art practice was used as canon fodder for Senghor’s political doctrine. An overview of some of the Laboratoire’s methods, focusing primarily on their early theatrical and street-centred work, is worthwhile here to reinforce this point.
The origins of the Laboratoire are very much rooted in theatre; during their first workshops at the Lat Dior Village the group collaborated with the experimental troupe Les Tréteaux[25] and Youssoupha Dione, another Laboratoire founding member, was a playwright.[26] His was an approach to theatre that prioritised the body and gesture, a practice echoed in Sy’s foot paintings from the late 1970s (fig. 2). Sy describes this way of painting as giving a ‘coup de pied’ (kick) to the establishment, the canvas coming to represent for Sy, like Samb, the shackles of an authoritarian cultural politics.[27] The Laboratoire at this time were also organising theatre workshops with patients at Dakar mental health units that point to a fusion of theatre and ndeup, [28] a collective ritual practiced by the Lebou ethnic group to rid people of evil spirits or illness.[29] The centrality of the body in the Laboratoire’s collective practice during its formative years can be understood through a reading of Antonin Artaud’s manifestos for the Theatre of Cruelty, described by Samb as having had a major influence on the Laboratoire.[30] In Artaud’s First Manifesto for example the dramatist proposes an elevated role for the body in his new ‘stage language’ and argues for the intelligence of ‘gestures and signs’, historically superseded in Western theatre by speech and text.[31] We can relate this proposition to earlier discussion of the historical hierarchy between written and embodied/spoken histories. His Second Manifesto deals more explicitly with the question of politics, and becomes relevant when considering the settings within which the Laboratoire performed.[32] In this manifesto, Artaud argues that theatre should respond to its contemporary circumstances and in a traditionally avant-garde vein rallies for the breakdown of any separation between art and life. The Laboratoire certainly used their performances to dismantle theatre’s fourth wall, whether through the ndeup workshops discussed above, collaborative shows on Dakar’s streets or the momentum they gave to the popular Set setal movement of the 1980s that saw the city’s young residents reclaim their urban surroundings through acts of cleaning and embellishment.
It is worth pausing briefly on the significance of the Set setal; Sy and Samb were fundamental in encouraging the movement, which means to be and make clean in Wolof, the most widely spoken vernacular language in Senegal. The coming together of notions of bodily cleanliness and urban regeneration suggests the importance of the body in enacting societal change. The Set setal was for many a way of forging new local narratives as Senegal was subjected to the upheaval of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programmes under President Abdou Diouf, Senghor’s successor.[33] Young people with few economic prospects in the context of government-imposed austerity took to the streets to defiantly enact change, painting local and religious icons on the city’s walls, far from the canvases of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Rejecting the art object and making new claims for the body in urban space is a tactic Sy was also exploring in his solo work of the time. In the 1980s he began using jute sacking to produce large-scale installations in the streets, or smaller pieces that he would sell to the Dakar populace for the same price as the bag of rice that the jute previously contained (fig. 3).[34] Grabski sees these acts as a commentary on the art object as commodity, an illuminating reading, but what is more pertinent in the context of this thesis is the way in which Sy sets up new scenarios for bodies to engage with art work, having an unpredictable phenomenological experience of his jute pieces hanging in the street. What’s more, buyers of his work could enter into a performative dialogue with the pieces that circulated and moved outside of the museum environment. The art object was no longer a codified document of negritude history but a prop in the performance of societal change fought for by the Laboratoire.[35] The term ‘prop’ is widely used in reference to the objects that appear in the Laboratoire’s practice, and I find that Mike Sell’s description of props in the context of the Black Arts Movement in the U.S. as having a ‘fitful conceptual instability that never fully resolves itself’ is, despite the geographical distance, instructive to this discussion.[36] The prop is an object with multiple meanings that shift depending on how, where and when it is used. I will return to the ‘instability’ of the prop and its fluidity of meaning later when thinking about Sy’s solo work. Looking again to Taylor’s framework, I argue that Sy’s jute work is the reconditioning of a repertoire. Instead of repeating a hierarchical narrative through the art object’s primacy, Sy provides the conditions for a new disruptive repertoire whereby everyday citizens become invaluable actors in the life of his pieces. As with the Set setal, bodily action emerges as a powerful tool to interfere with established narratives.
El Hadji Sy painting hanging in the streets of Niaye Thioker, Dakar.
Fig. 3. Film still from Prisma Afrika (1992); Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
Building on this opening discussion of the Laboratoire’s relationship to the body and history, I will now focus on their 1995 performance SOS Culture to expand on and analyse in greater depth the way Sy and Samb use embodied practice to challenge perspectives on the archive.
Mummification and memorials - the repertoire performed in SOS Culture.
In 1995 the UK played host to a huge festival of African art, africa95. It took place across multiple locations and encompassed a vast array of work, from an exhibition of philanthropist Jean Pigozzi’s private collection at the Serpentine Gallery to a photography show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. SOS Culture was performed by El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb at the opening night of the Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (referred to hereafter as Seven Stories) exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, curated by Clementine Deliss in collaboration with several artists from the African continent including Sy.[37] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the Laboratoire had been producing numerous performances, with Sy acting as metteur en scène and Samb as the philosopher and ‘jester’ who conceptualised disruptive methods of social and political commentary.[38] I have chosen to focus on this particular performance for a number of reasons. Firstly, the criticism directed at the Laboratoire following the show’s opening reveals anxieties around the containment of narratives. These anxieties were, I argue, directly provoked in SOS Culture. Secondly, the movement of the Laboratoire from Dakar to London throws into sharp relief the way that differences in language and wider cultural reference points come to have a bearing on how knowledge is passed on. Thirdly, Sy and Samb instrumentalised a number of strategies in this performance that call upon memory, history and death, concepts that are central to politics of the archive. In researching SOS Culture, I have relied to a great degree on Deliss’ own accounts, on footage of the performance that is today housed at the Whitechapel Gallery’s archives in London and on reviews that appeared at the time of the performance. Sy and Samb’s practice is deliberately located in zones of ambiguity, necessitating mediation and translation by the audience or viewer whether in London or Dakar, and this study inserts itself into that tradition. In this sense the legacy of SOS Culture continues to add to the development of what is today a rich critical discussion on performance and the archive.
I pause on the controversy surrounding SOS Culture because as mentioned it points to a need on the part of audience members for epistemological containment and control, one of the raisons d’être of archives. What’s more, today it is far easier to access reviews of the exhibition than to view films of the performance itself. The epistemologically anxious critiques of the show have come to take up a significant part of the most readily accessible archives of the performance. What can be understood as a double knowledge anxiety thus takes place, as the temporal ephemerality of the performance, underpinned by its confusing content, keeps it untenable and on the surface unknown. The first aspect of Seven Stories that seemed to confound critics was the collaborative format of the exhibition. This was an extension of the methodology of the Laboratoire and one of its partner initiatives Tenq. Tenq, meaning joint or articulation in Wolof, was a programme of workshops, discussions and exhibitions that began in the original Village des arts. In 1994 Sy and Deliss brought together international artists for a two-week Tenq workshop at the French lycée in Saint Louis, Senegal’s northern-most city that sits over three hundred kilometres from Dakar (fig. 4).[39] The 1994 residency was a direct precursor to Seven Stories, and its collaborative, discursive nature was a model for the way Deliss wished the exhibition to run. She describes for example wanting to bring together ‘bits of conversations’ as opposed to objects, [40] and the opening weeks of the show included not only the Laboratoire’s performance but also a ‘Graphic Ceremony’ of live painting by Hassan Musa, highlighting the centrality of process over product to the curators’ visions.[41] The result was an exhibition with no overarching narrative, but instead seven sections each led by a different artist come curator, elaborating possible movements out of a central joint or tenq.
Fig 4. El Hadji Sy with school children in his studio at Tenq, Saint Louis, 1994. Photo by Djibril Sy
Fig 5. Issa Samb and El Hadji Sy; SOS Culture, Whitechapel Gallery London, 1995. Photo by Clémentine Deliss. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
One of the most vocal critics of Seven Stories was Okwui Enwezor who in early 1996 published an article in Frieze magazine that ripped the curatorial strategy to shreds.[42] In the piece Enwezor ironically oscillates between vilifying Deliss and her co-curators for not constructing enough of a narrative whilst accusing them in the same breath of a ‘historicisation’ of contemporary African art.[43] Enwezor seems to be particularly and personally offended by the Senegalese section of the exhibition and laments the Laboratoire’s shift from the Dakar street to the London gallery. He felt that the section curated by Sy provided an incomplete ‘story’ of Senegalese art,[44] an undeniably impossible feat to ask of the Dakarois artist, particularly when we consider that in his article Enwezor readily admits his tendency towards a diasporic ‘nostalgia’ that wants to rely on an arrangement of signifiers for building history.[45] T. J. Clark’s response to press surrounding the first exhibition of Manet’s Olympia highlights a similar anxiety that seems to repeatedly emerge when expectations in terms of historically-bound narratives in art are confounded.[46] The Laboratoire’s intervention in Seven Stories is at once anti-textual and inter-textual, using props, signifiers, symbols and gestures to prompt active and multiple translations. If, to quote Enwezor, the memory of the African in the diaspora is an ‘occupied territory’, then the Laboratoire is a liberation movement that discards the tools of the oppressor and as with the Set setal, make new claims for the way that memory is constructed.
In order to further challenge Enwezor’s critique, I wish now to take a closer look at SOS Culture through a prism of different writing on performance and knowledge. For Diana Taylor, performance provokes subject awareness through its very avoidance of direct translatability; it is mediated by the gap between the performer’s and viewer’s knowledge and corporeal experience.[47] The methodology proposed by Antonin Artaud seeks this very subject awareness, and the similarities between criticism of SOS Culture and those of the Living Theatre - also inheritors of Artaudian theory - expose the level of discomfort audience members often experienced following their immersion in a sphere of narrative disruption and anti-textual freedom.[48] Writing in the Village Voice, critic Michael Smith describes the Living Theatre as constructing entirely new frames of reference to which the audience had to ‘acclimatize’.[49] Drawing a parallel between the Laboratoire and the Living Theatre, I argue that the new frames of reference built by each collective served to problematise those already in existence and the way that they determined modes of knowledge consumption. Taylor’s argument and elements of the Artaudian legacy counteract Enwezor’s reductive critique. What’s more, Rebecca Schneider argues that the centrality of the body in performance problematises the viewer’s desire for control over what they see.[50] The bodies of Sy and Samb are central to SOS Culture; Sy does not utter a word throughout and Samb speaks in a combination of Wolof and French, and at times makes unintelligible grunts and howls. Linguistically, much of the performance would have been incomprehensible to audience members. Furthermore the audience is not left to quietly contemplate the jute paintings that are unrolled during the performance, instead objects and bodies are in perpetual motion, highlighting their importance all the while remaining unfixed. Samb’s mummification of Sy also serves to draw our attention to the performers’ bodies, particularly at the moment when images are projected onto Sy’s white bandages, turning his corporeal frame into a canvas (fig. 5). It is all the more disappointing therefore that Enwezor is so dismissive of this aspect of the performance, particularly when considering that in multiple performance canons the place of the body in asserting and redressing history had been acknowledged by the mid–1990s, such as in feminist or multicultural performance.[51]
If embodied action is a way of challenging epistemological containment, then Samb’s deployment of foreign languages during SOS Culture further complicates how a viewer might try to gain an understanding of the performance. In an avant-garde move, reminiscent of Hugo Ball’s 1916 Karawane performance, he rejects logocentrism by pushing audience members towards a need for translation.[52] The Laboratoire have regularly used language in this way, in their 1999 performance Memoire fracturée in Antwerp the members mostly conversed in Wolof. Speaking is a key part of the Laboratoire’s practice, and although Samb is not from a griot (storyteller) caste, he is a prolific orator who uses his words with great precision, more often than not to provide alternative versions of the truth. Samb has been referred to by Laboratoire members as a contrabandiste d’idées or a ‘smuggler of ideas’, and in his speeches and writing truth and fiction come together to offer new interpretations of reality that are self-consciously aware of their potential.[53] There are two key points to be addressed when considering how Samb uses speech; the first is to think about the extent to which orality offers a counterpart to the mainstream archive, and the second is to consider what happens when speech is made incomprehensible by way of movement across linguistic zones.
Della Pollock has traced the coming together of performance studies and oral histories, arguing that from the 1970s onwards the performativity of oral history had been recognised, thus opening up new possibilities for ways of thinking about those histories.[54] The symbiotic relationship between narrative and performance, echoed in Taylor’s thesis, is encapsulated by anthropologist Victor Turner’s term homo performans.[55] As humans, oral storytelling is of particular importance for our sense of self and society in that it allows us to negotiate the limits and possibilities of established narratives through a collective experience. In this schema, the place of the audience is of utmost importance. Such an understanding chimes with studies on the position of the griot in West African society. The connection between the griot and the ‘performative turn’ in anthropology, which in turn informs my own reflections, is also inspired by Samb and Sy’s repeated references to their local cultures. The Lebou and Wolof environments within which the two grew up and to which they remained close, are cited by the artists much in the same way as they will refer to Artaud, Picasso or the Situationist International. In Senegal the griot has several functions, including that of historian. The tête historique (historical mind) of the griot is trained for years to remember the smallest detail of a narrative, and most importantly to know how to relay an event and shape that detail for an audience in order to inform the future.[56] The societal function of the griot is not to be underestimated, and their pivotal position as negotiators of knowledge and audience leads us unsurprisingly to think about their role in terms of the archive. Indeed Babacar Mbaye Ndaak, a Wolof griot who also teaches history, confirms that oral performance can work in combination with written archives to produce nuanced histories.[57]
Nonetheless, I wish to draw out an aspect of oral history that sets it apart from the material archive, namely its more explicitly dialogical nature. Samuel Schrager describes oral history as an ‘on-going history of dialogic relations’ and the importance of a collective experience of orality, particularly in West Africa, points to a general understanding of oral storytelling that places social relations at its heart.[58] The place of the body in oral history is by no means incidental to the way that it is understood to activate collective experience. I have mapped out the ways that speech can function as explicitly performative archives, and now seek to show that the Laboratoire is drawing this to our attention through disrupting processes of knowledge transmission through orality. Samb’s recourse to speech in SOS Culture, and most importantly the griot-like style of his delivery, enables us to think about how knowledge is exchanged through the proximity between teller and audience that is then challenged by their linguistic distance in the Anglophone space of the Whitechapel Gallery. This distance is accentuated in SOS Culture at the moment when Samb addresses an audience member who has been brought into the performance, first in French, then in German. The audience member responds in English, creating a moment of jarring awkwardness that reiterates the Laboratoire’s strategy of disruption in Artaudian fashion. Aside from speaking in French, German and Wolof, Samb frequently produces sounds that do not seem to have traceable linguistic origins. These sounds evade codes of language that we search for; they are symbolic and expressive, but it is not for so much that we cannot imagine that they have meaning. To the uninitiated ear, many of the sounds of SOS Culture were foreign, but it most certainly means something that the Laboratoire did not translate their performance into English. In my view, Samb and Sy were playing with the in-between zone of untranslatability between what they knew and what the audience knew. As pointed out by Derrida, each archive is idiomatic and therefore necessitates an act of mediated translation.[59] In posing a two-fold challenge to typical channels of knowledge transmission coming from the non-Western world - the written archive and the dominance of European languages - this strategy of the Laboratoire threw into sharp relief the limits of the audience members’ knowledge, a frustrating and undermining turn of events as demonstrated by Enwezor’s account.
The final point that I wish to discuss with regards to SOS Culture is the way that Sy and Samb call upon death and rebirth to problematise what Rebecca Schneider describes as the death-defying impulse that drives the archive, and that has informed the extent to which performance is received as an affront in this arguably Western logic.[60] If the archive is constructed to organise remains, the place of the defiantly alive body in performance poses a challenge to such an act of ordering.[61] The ‘culturally myopic’ approach to performance as disappearance, as discussed above, thus becomes clear.[62] The presence of the body in performance, in line with the thinking of Joseph Roach, participates in its own way with history and the future. The Laboratoire’s engagement with the theme of death is therefore a proposition for alternative ways of thinking about memory and the archive; Sy and Samb turn their backs on the fixing of remains and instead use performance to cancel out the finality of death. Koyo Kouoh, curator of the 2014 Iniva exhibition Issa Samb: From the Ethics of Acting to the Empire without Signs and Samb’s long-term collaborator, turns to Lebou philosophy to argue that for Samb ‘the dead are never dead’.[63] Deliss turns to the Laboratoire’s courtyard in downtown Dakar, for many years one of the collective’s central meeting points and performance spaces to think their relationship to death. The courtyard is renowned for housing props from performances that have been exposed over time to Sahelian dust and Atlantic rainfall, not preserved in glass cases or temperature-controlled vaults but remaining in enduring dialogue with their environment (fig. 6). For Deliss such a state of affairs recalls Georges Bataille’s theory that rituals of domestic cleanliness are attempts at death-defiance.[64] At this point a parallel becomes clear between the death-defiance of the archival impulse and cleanliness. The two are one and the same in the Laboratoire’s courtyard as objects that in a Senghorian strategy would be an integral part of the national archive-come-narrative are left to organically remain in interplay with alternative forces, away from political co-optation. Although seemingly at odds with Deliss’ analysis, the cleanliness celebrated in the Set setal movement is less rooted in Bataillean ritual than in a dynamic of collective urban motion, an archive that develops in real-time as new frescoes of local figures or painted signs responding to civic nuisances emerge on a regular basis.
Fig 6. The Laboratoire Agit'Art courtyard, Dakar, 1992. Photo by Clémentine Deliss. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, Diaphanes. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes 2015
Fig 7. Installation by El Hadji Sy in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, 1996. Photo by Clémentine Deliss
Focusing on SOS Culture, death is a theme that appears explicitly. Early in the performance, Sy and Samb bring an object that resembles a mummified corpse onto the stage, after which Samb proceeds to mummify Sy who remains wrapped in bandages for almost the duration of the performance. It comes as no surprise that death featured so centrally in the performance when we know that shortly prior to the opening of the exhibition Laboratoire member Youssoupha Dione had suddenly passed away. In fact, Samb had arrived at Heathrow airport for the show pulling an effigy of the playwright along the ground (fig.7).[65] These objects or acts are not however symbolic memorials, but rather active vehicles of meaning in the present. Samb sees objects as host to ‘polysemy’, and in 1996 wrote ‘I’m sick of seeing drawings, of seeing objects, of seeing the past and of talking to myself about the present. Of which present are you talking about if not of presence itself?’.[66] This quote is illuminating; Samb rejects using objects to fix certain meanings, as has already been noted, and sees them instead as sites upon and through which the past inserts itself into the present and thus gains presence. In SOS Culture, symbolically transforming Sy from live performer to dead object who is then reborn is a fascinating gesture that seems to refuse the irrevocability of death and therefore the organisation of remains through an archival process. Despite disagreeing with Phelan on certain points, her reading of Angelika Festa’s Untitled Dance (with fish and others) (1987) is useful for thinking about the shrouding of the body as both mummification (‘history as death’) and cocoon (‘future-as-unborn’), an analysis that has proven particularly relevant to my own reflections on SOS Culture.[67]
El Hadji Sy and the art object as prop in ‘repertoire’.
In SOS Culture El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb enacted a highly performative relationship to the object, wherein the performativity of the art object itself was not denied. I turn now to an enquiry into the solo work of Sy and the way in which he has continuously used art objects as props in a larger and self-aware performance of knowledge, memory and history. The destruction of the original Village des arts undoubtedly went some way towards thrusting these concerns to the centre of Sy’s work, indeed it was after the eviction that Sy began to place large numbers of his pieces in the care of Friedrich Axt, the now deceased German linguist and collector.[68] I argue nonetheless that when tracing the development of Sy’s work these preoccupations appear to have already been present pre–1983. Sy has consistently demonstrated a direct involvement with the art object as archive that I understand as a dialogue between embodied knowledge (repertoire) and collected objects in a rich combination of performance, collaboration and exhibition.
As early as 1975 Sy was involved in theatre work, designing the set for Ibrahima Sall’s play Le choix - Madior. Placed alongside his foot paintings and jute pieces, his early practice is illuminating in that it highlights the way in which he enters into a choreography with art objects.[69] Clémentine Deliss has called this a ‘dramaturgy of artistic practice’.[70] What is key, no matter the terminology, is the dialogical relationship that Sy fosters between body and art object. He has in fact pointed to a desire to investigate the ties between theatre and the visual arts as the impetus for the founding of the Laboratoire.[71] In photographs of his work he either inserts himself and other people into the picture plane or puts multiple pieces together in an assemblage, showing a preoccupation with exposing the processes of mediation that go into the archiving of artwork (fig. 8).[72] Once again Benjaminian theory can be applied here; in 1934 Benjamin exalted the insertion of objects into ‘living social relations’ in order for them to gain value, a point of view played out across the spectrum of Sy’s work.[73] In 1984 for example he undertook the landmark project of producing an anthology of Senegalese contemporary art with Friedrich Axt. In preparing the anthology, published in 1989, Sy had been carrying out a restructuring of the narrative of Senegalese artistic chronology and hierarchy that had been laid down by Senghor. This process has been repeated in recent years in exhibitions in Frankfurt and Prague, where Sy delves into both Axt’s private collection of Senegalese art and the host institutions’ own ethnographic archives to place art objects into new and invigorating interplays. It makes sense that Sy’s prolonged project of inter-cultural collaboration was carried out with Axt, as a linguist someone who by profession worked in the gaps of translatability, manoeuvring through in-between zones of knowledge transmission in search of new possibilities for communication. Much in the same way as a linguist strives to refine the way that we employ codes of language which are in a state of permanent transformation, Sy considers his work within archives to be ‘pruning the tree of earlier definitions’.[74] His archival strategy is not centred on concerns over conservation, but rather on the anthropomorphic way that materials change over time, transgressing in meaning and aesthetic impact.[75] The art object for Sy is therefore not a ‘didactic tool, discarded after the performance as a mere footnote to the event’, as described by Ima Ebong, but as I have already pointed out a vehicle for multiple and changing meanings that sits somewhere between the Derridean cultural politics of Senghor and the ‘anti-archive’ label that is so often given to the Laboratoire.[76]
El Hadji Sy performance at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo by Clementine Deliss, 1995
Fig 8. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
A preoccupation with gaps and spaces in-between is central to the work of Samb and Sy, as I have shown throughout this dissertation. It is also a concern around which much discussion of the archive has been revolving since the global turn of the late 1980s. Speaking about the lack of artistic archives in the Middle East, Anthony Downey argues that these art historical gaps are fertile ground for the emergence of new dynamics of knowledge,[77] and Stuart Hall describes the danger of the archive becoming ‘prisoner of a single “line”’.[78] I read Sy’s practice in light of this theoretical framework that does not shy away from the unknown and unchartered, from his involvement in the Set setal movement and the founding of Tenq to his long-term collaboration with Axt, culminating in the recent Painting, Performance, Politics exhibitions. Indeed, Manon Schwich identifies the numerous ways in which Sy has throughout his life worked at once with and against structures of power in order to deliberately and explicitly transgress any ‘single line’ of authority on artistic practice[79]. In other words, Sy nurtures gaps and spaces in-between through a performative critical engagement with art objects in an extension of those Laboratoire’s strategies that I have already discussed. Deliss describes this state as the ‘parallax view’; the deliberate tripping up and dislodging of an epistemological perspective to disrupt and draw attention to its very construction. [80] In this vein, the parallax view is akin to a dialectic approach to history that would also challenge the authority of any one archive.
For Sy, the viewer has an integral role to play in this process of exploring the gaps between that which is known and that which is not. In his 2003 exhibition Joola at Dakar’s Artefact Gallery, Sy provided a demonstration of how history and the archive could be challenged by asking the viewer to enter into a highly performative relationship with the art object. Joola references the ferry that whilst travelling from Senegal’s southern city Ziguinchor to Dakar in September 2002 sank off the coast of the Gambia, resulting in approximately two thousand deaths and going down as the second most deadly maritime accident in history. The event shook the Senegalese nation, and Sy speaks of other human dramas that informed the vernissage-performance (opening-performance) of Joola such as the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York.[81] Death was clearly at the forefront of Sy’s concerns at the turn of the millennium, much as it had been for the Laboratoire throughout the 1990s. For the vernissage-performance of Joola he gave over the almost literal organisation of that-which-remains to the public, in a gesture of collective archiving. In the centre of the gallery space were a set of large black containers, within which visitors found portraits Sy had painted of victims of the Joola sinking that they were then invited to hang and order on the gallery walls (fig. 9). From Diana Taylor’s viewpoint, the repertoire allows the past to be ‘experienced as present’, and I consider Joola to be a moment at which Sy prompts his audience into performing repertoire as an homage to those who tragically lost their lives with the sinking of the Joola.[82] The organisation of the portraits, qua history, exposes the archival process as a construction and performative act. What’s more, the power of the collective to challenge and inform history’s construction, as with the Set Setal, is here given the space by Sy to come into being. In SOS Culture this gap is exposed and aggravated, much like in the Laboratoire’s Memoire fracturée performance where different historical narratives - from the Wolof Yang-Yang Empire to Cheikh Anta Diop’s black Egyptology - rub up against one another.[83] In Joola Sy goes one step further by inserting the public into the gap to nurture a process whereby ‘…the system of solidarity and sharing transforms the object into a new vehicle of information’.[84]
Fig 9. Exhibition goers at the opening-performance of Joola by El Hadji Sy at Galerie Artefact, Dakar, 2003. Photo by Mamadou Touré Behan. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
Fig 10. Demain dans nos deux mains ("Tomorrow is in our hands") street performance. Les Petites Pierres, Dakar. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Joire, 2012
Conclusion
Tracing key moments in the practice of El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb, I have shown that both artists have used performative methods to challenge the archival process and that their work adds to an already rich discussion on the relationship between knowledge transmission and performance. Coming of age during the presidency of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sy and Samb along with the Laboratoire Agit’Art rebelled against the leader’s political co-optation of art objects into the national archive of négritude. From the end of the 1970s and throughout the following decade they destroyed artworks or reconfigured them as props to collectively disrupt and rethink the narratives that shaped the urban environment of Dakar. In 1995 their performance SOS Culture at London’s Whitechapel Gallery provoked discomfort among critics, a deliberate tactic on their part to push the boundaries of how audience members could expect to consume knowledge and engage in its organisation and transmission. Sy has also worked within institutional archives to highlight the performativity of the archival process.
By way of conclusion, I return to the Village des arts. Since 1996 it has been housed in a former Chinese workers’ camp in the north of the Dakar peninsula, a gift to Tenq from the Senegalese Ministry of Culture. A further dislocation has taken place in recent years as Sy has worked extensively in rural parts of Senegal with social practice group Huit Facettes to challenge the increasingly fast-growing dominance of the urban over the rural in the twenty-first century, particularly in Africa.[85] Kan-Si and other younger members of Huit Facettes demonstrate an acute concern with knowledge transmission between the city and countryside in what I call a parallax turn, inspired by Clémentine Deliss’ ‘parallax view’.[86] Numerous artist collectives active over the last decade in Dakar such as Les Petites Pierres and Kër Thiossane, inheritors of the Laboratoire and Tenq models, have integrated the Set setal into a practice that acknowledges public space as a site for the emergence of multiple narratives, and the last ten years have seen an eruption of dance troupes and schools across Senegal as traditional performances of embodied narrative have collided with global trends in dance (fig. 10). This year it was with great sadness that we bid goodbye to Issa Samb, and as we look to the inheritors of his groundbreaking practice it is more important than ever that there be a sustained engagement with the work he gave us, and in particular when thinking through what it could mean to produce his archives. The gravity of this process has only been confounded by the rapid and soulless destruction of his downtown courtyard. But as we have seen already at Lat Dior and beyond, the ephemerality of these sites’ active lifespans can be challenged and even appropriated by artistic action. My hope therefore that this task be taken seriously is presently being confirmed by a younger generation of agitateurs, urgently using performance to keep the Laboratoire archive alive. I give them my thanks.
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SenewebNews. Boulimie foncière : Le terrain de l’ex-camp Lat Dior morcelé et vendu à des privés, un architecte décide de porter plainte contre l’Etat. Seneweb, 02 April 2012, https://www.seneweb.com/news/Societe/boulimie-fonciere-le-terrain-de-l-rsquo-ex-camp-lat-dior-morcele-et-vendu-a-des-prives-un-architecte-decide-de-porter-plain_n_63271.html, Accessed on 20 January 2016. ↩
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Issa Samb also goes by the alias Joe Ouakam ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms: Laboratoire AGIT’art and Tenq in Dakar in the 1990s’ in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 36 (Summer 2014), p.19 ↩
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In 2014 both Sy and Samb had solo exhibitions in Europe, in Frankfurt and London respectively. Sy’s exhibition Painting, Performance, Politics is currently on show in Prague. ↩
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J. Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. E. Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p.2 ↩
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Ibid., p.3 ↩
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A. Dickerson, ‘Archival Life in the New Century; Considerations of Mission and Structure for African-Centred Institutions’ in Third Text, vol. 54, Spring 2001, Kala Press, p.101 ↩
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S. Hall, ‘Constituting an archive’ in Third Text, vol. 54, Spring 2001, Kala Press, p.89 ↩
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R. Schneider, ‘Performance Remains’ in Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 6:2, 2001, p.103 ↩
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P. Phelan, ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’ in Unmarked; the politics of performance, Routledge, 1992, p.146 ↩
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S. Lütticken, Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art, NAi Publishers, 2005, p.165 ↩
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To name but three examples from 2016; Performing for the Camera (Tate Modern), The sun went in, the fire went out: landscapes in film, performance and text (Chelsea Space) and Rose English; A Premonition of the Act (Camden Arts Centre) ↩
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D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003 ↩
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D. Taylor, p.21 ↩
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J. Roach quoted in D. Taylor, p.5 ↩
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C. Fusco, ‘The Other History of Intercultural Performance’ in TDR (1988-), Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), p.149 ↩
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L. S. Senghor, Ce que je crois: Négritude, Francité et Civilisation de l’Universel, Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1988, p.136 ↩
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J. L. Grabski, ‘The Historical Invention and Contemporary Practice of Modern Senegalese Art: Three Generations of Artists in Dakar’ Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 2001, University of Indiana, p.75 ↩
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See Alioune Sene’s foreword to Cultural Policy in Senegal, UNESCO, Paris, 1973 ↩
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K. Kouoh, ed.,Word! Word? Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form, Sternberg Press, 2013, p.13 ↩
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W. Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, Verso 1998, p.94 ↩
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A. Bathily, Mai 1968 à Dakar: ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie, Chaka, 1992 ↩
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J. L. Grabski, p.81 ↩
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Ibid., p.80 ↩
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C. Deliss, 2014, p.5 ↩
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Other early members include filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety, poet Thierno Seydou Sall and painter Fodé Camara ↩
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J. L. Grabski, p.92 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers: Laboratoire Agit’Art, Tenq and Huit Facettes in Dakar in the 1990s’, video, part of Artists as Curator: Collaborative Practices symposium, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 19.04.2013, http://www.afterall.org/online/_artist-as-curator_collaborative-practices_symposium_artists-as-model-engineers_laboratoire-agit_art/#.VxTGJk32aHs ↩
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The Lebou are an ethnic group who since the fifteenth century have been present in the Dakar region, and from which Issa Samb hails. See A. Sylla, Le people Lébou de la presqu’île du Cap-Vert, Les Nouvelles Editions africaines du Sénégal, 1992 ↩
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I. Samb, ‘Mediums de Transformation’, Metronome, ed. C. Deliss, No.0, May, Dakar, 1996, p.2 ↩
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A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. V. Corti, Calder Publications, 1993, p.70 and p.73 ↩
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Ibid., pp. 81 - 87 ↩
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M. Diouf, ‘Wall Paintings and the Writing of History: Set/Setal in Dakar’ in GEFAME: Journal of African Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2005, accessed via http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=gefame;cc=gefame;q1=dlps;rgn=main;view=text;idno=4761563.0002.102 ↩
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J. L. Grabski, p.94 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers: Laboratoire Agit’Art, Tenq and Huit Facettes in Dakar in the 1990s’ ↩
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M. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus and the Black Arts Movement, The University of Michigan Press, 2005, p.220 ↩
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The other artist-curators were Chika Okeke, Salah M. Hassan, David Koloane and Wanjiku Nyachae ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms’, p.11 ↩
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For more information on the Tenq workshops see C. Deliss ‘Brothers in Arms’ ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers’ ↩
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Interview with Hassan Musa as part of artist interviews from Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa, VHS, Whitechapel Gallery Archives, London ↩
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O. Enwezor, ‘Occupied Territories’ in Frieze, issue 26, Jan-Feb 1996, pp.36 - 41 ↩
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Ibid., p.39 ↩
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Ibid., p.38 ↩
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Ibid., p.37 ↩
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T. J. Clark, ‘Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of “Olympia” in 1865’ in Screen (1980), 21:1, pp.18 - 42 ↩
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D. Taylor, p.15 ↩
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M. Sell, p.82 ↩
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Ibid ↩
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R. Schneider, p.103 ↩
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C. Ugwu, Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance ed. Catherine Ugwu, Bay Press Seattle, ICA London, 1995 ↩
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Elizabeth Harney explores the interplay between the vanguards of the avant-garde and the Laboratoire Agit’Art in ‘Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London’ in New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4, Autumn 2010, pp.731 - 751 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms’, p.16 ↩
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D. Pollock, ‘Moving Histories: performance and oral history’ pp. 120 - 135 in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies ed. Tracy C. Davis, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p.120 ↩
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V. Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, University of Arizona Press, 1985, p.167 ↩
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J. Jansen, The griot’s craft; an essay on oral tradition and diplomacy, Hamburg, LIT, 2000, p.10 ↩
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Field interview with author conducted in November, 2015 ↩
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D. Pollock, p.123 ↩
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J. Derrida, p.90 ↩
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R. Schneider, p.101 ↩
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Ibid., p.103 ↩
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Ibid., p.101 ↩
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‘Curator Koyo Kouoh on Issa Samb’s exhibition at Iniva’, 2014, video available online http://www.iniva.org/exhibitions_projects/2014/issa_samb/koyo_kouoh_video ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms’, p.11 ↩
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Ibid., p.14 ↩
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I. Samb, 1996 ↩
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P. Phelan, p.156 ↩
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C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba, eds., El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, Diaphanes, 2015, p.11 ↩
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C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba, 2015, p.14 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Free Fall - Freeze Frame; Africa, exhibitions, artists’ in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. B. W. Ferguson, R. Greenberg and S. Nairne, Routledge, 2005, p.207 ↩
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E. H. Sy quoted by C. Deliss, lecture part of Experience as Institutions: Artist collectives and cultural platforms in Africa, Tate Modern, 29.11.2013, video availible online http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/experience-institution-artist-collectives-video-recording ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers’ ↩
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W. Benjamin, p.87 ↩
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C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba, 2015, p.11 ↩
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J. Grosse and E. H. Sy, ‘El Hadji Sy in conversation with Julia Grosse: The Artwork becomes a socialised object, enhanced and embellished by the community’ in El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, p.42 ↩
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I. Ebong, ‘Negritude: Between Mask and Flag. Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the “Ecole de Dakar”’ in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace ed. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, Iniva, London, 1999, p.141 ↩
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A. Downey, ed., Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, I.B.Tauris, 2015, p.20 ↩
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S. Hall, p.91 ↩
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M. Schwich, ‘Cardiology of a Life’s Work’ in El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, p.351 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘The Parallax View’ in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 1 (1999), p.54 ↩
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J. Pires ‘Sénégal: El Sy à la galerie Artefact: un peintre et ses glissements d’identités’ on AllAfrica, 19.04.2003, http://fr.allafrica.com/stories/200304210031.html (accessed 18.02.2016) ↩
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D. Taylor, p.24 ↩
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Mamadou Diouf, ‘El Hadji Sy and the quest for a post-negritude aesthetics’ in El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, p.138 ↩
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J. Grosse and E. H. Sy, 2015, p.45 ↩
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Kan-Si ‘Huit Facettes : A Reply from Kan-Si’ in Documenta 11_Platform 5 : Exhibition : Catalogue, eds. H. Ander and N. Rottner, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, pp.570 - 571 ↩
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M-T. Champesme, L’universel? Dialogues avec Senghor, Face à Face, 2004 ↩
May 2020. Vol nº1