MEDI1TV Afrique : Art plastique, cinéma et football - 09/12/2023
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00:00 [Music]
00:09 It's with great pleasure that I meet you on Mediain TV for this new cultural stopover in the heart of Africa.
00:15 In fact, in a few moments we will talk about photography, we will talk about art with Mamdia Régnan, a photographer who made us vibrate.
00:23 We will also talk about cinema, with the sacred work of Esmail Mouded during the last International Film Festival in Marrakech for his film "La mer des mensonges".
00:32 For the hour, we talk about art, once again with a big "A", with the great, very great Zoulou Bayé.
00:38 [Music]
00:44 And today, we have the immense pleasure of welcoming one of the pioneers, one of the masters of contemporary African art as we know it.
00:53 A real living institution, we no longer present him, he is with us, Zoulou Bayé, hello.
00:59 It's going very well, excellent.
01:01 It is an honor to receive you today, as I said, at the moment you are a real institution, a pioneer of contemporary African art as we know it today.
01:13 And today we have the immense pleasure of welcoming you.
01:15 So my first question, since I personally ask myself, how did you come to art?
01:21 Was it something that was in you since childhood or was it fate that guided you on this path?
01:27 Let's talk about fate, because as they say, chance does not exist.
01:34 I came to art by circumstances that surprised me a lot, because in my tender childhood, I did not know, because living in a small village far from the city in Senegal, I did not know that it was a work of art.
01:51 And it was only in high school that I started to draw during my Latin classes, which I did not like very much, and I was put out of high school.
02:03 So one day I met my Latin teacher who said to me, "What are you doing now, young man?"
02:08 I said, "I do accounting." He said, "Where are the drawings you made during my class?"
02:13 And I said to him, "Well, I can find them at home."
02:16 He said to me, "I eat at a teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Dakar and I wanted to introduce you."
02:23 And he introduced me to this teacher who had free works, who invited me to attend his free works.
02:31 And that's how, as a destiny, as I said, I started doing art 53 years ago.
02:37 So really, it's fate, you could say.
02:42 And fate sometimes does things very well.
02:45 And it's true that when we see African contemporary art, you were a pioneer.
02:51 You truly signed an artistic transfer for the African contemporary pictorial scene.
02:59 And why have you always been seen as a rebel child?
03:03 Can you explain that to us?
03:05 But that's what made me get kicked out of high school.
03:10 Because, indeed, I was a rebel child.
03:14 But I think I put all that in the course of fate.
03:17 And I don't explain it too much.
03:21 In fact, I was a conductor.
03:24 I was an actor, one of the most prominent actors of what we called the Dakar School.
03:32 I think we can talk about this movement.
03:34 And this school was born in the 1960s and was a little boosted, supported by President Leopold Sedar Senghor.
03:42 And I was a recognized actor in this movement.
03:45 I see this movement as a claim, because this movement carries our identity as African Negroes.
03:52 This movement leaves us a little bit of what we are inculcated with, and what we come from.
04:01 And that we are necessarily pushed to follow.
04:04 And me and my colleagues from this movement in the 1960s and 1970s, we resisted.
04:10 And we were noticed, especially in the context of the Dakar Biennale,
04:15 to create an offer that was a kind of boycott of philosophy.
04:21 How?
04:23 Continue, continue, go ahead.
04:27 There's just a little "continue".
04:29 Oh yeah.
04:32 So, that's it.
04:34 And in the context of this conference where I am invited today, I will talk about the history of this offer,
04:41 which is a claim for a pictorial identity that we want to preserve.
04:45 Because everywhere new breaths come to us, and that we may not ignore, but digest.
04:55 And, as they say, be able to use them in our plastic approach.
04:59 But that's why you say I'm a bit of a leader in an artistic movement that was known in the 1970s.
05:08 And so far, a few of my colleagues and I in Dakar continue this fight, this fight.
05:14 We are from the Dakar School and we take it high and strong.
05:19 And that's exactly where I wanted to come to, Mr. Mbaye.
05:23 You see art as a claim.
05:27 For you, it's an act of commitment.
05:29 And today we see this new generation of African artists, very talented, this new generation.
05:40 What do you think about it?
05:42 You, who are a real school of life, what is your view of this new generation?
05:47 What do you like about them and what do you maybe blame them for?
05:52 Well, listen, art is simply a claim.
05:57 It's not enough, it's not a question of making an illustration of our, how to say, of our claim.
06:03 Because we have tools today, such as television.
06:08 We are on television.
06:09 There is radio, there are reporter journalists who talk about everyday issues.
06:14 So for me, the commitment in art is the commitment in beauty.
06:19 But what I blame contemporary African artists for today is that they think that the commitment in art is to hold a hoop, a hammer, a hammer,
06:33 as we tend to see in Western art of a certain time.
06:39 No, I think that we, African black people, we have other things to offer the world.
06:45 Because even if a single line on a canvas is a claim, and my claim is in that sense,
06:54 it's not reporting, how to say, political activities.
07:01 It's not that, the claim, I think they're wrong about it.
07:05 The claim is in the quest for love, in the quest for universal peace.
07:10 And that, every work of art in its essence carries that.
07:15 And so I don't understand, because those in the West who talk about claims,
07:21 who have social projects, environmental projects, because they live in a consumer society where they are in,
07:29 it's their activities, it's their trajectory that brought them there.
07:33 And I don't think that this trajectory is that of Africa.
07:36 Africa must offer something else, another approach, and re-read our codes and our signs and our symbols,
07:45 not with Western glasses or elsewhere, but with our own glasses.
07:50 Because that's what we have to offer the world.
07:53 And that's where we're going to interest the world, and not in our own way.
07:59 Our African-African-ness, as you have always claimed, Mr. Baillé.
08:05 And before we leave, I would like you to come back to this event in which you participate.
08:12 So, the dialogue between art and writing, with Eugène Eboté-Leila N'Humaine,
08:20 but also your book, "L'Afrique célèbre".
08:23 Can you tell us about it?
08:26 I am invited today to this conference on the theme "Is the universal humanist ideal unfinished?"
08:34 And in this context, I am going to make a contribution to talk about the history of the offer of the Biennale in Dakar.
08:42 In fact, the Biennale, until the '94-'95, was open to the whole world, to artists from all over the world.
08:50 And it was in '96 that Senegal decided to Africanize this Biennale.
08:57 And I said, "It's not normal." I was completely against this idea because we don't have cultural infrastructure.
09:04 We don't have museums. We don't have galleries. We don't have art markets.
09:10 Africanize African art would mean ghettoizing it, locking it up.
09:15 And I organized, with a few artists from a dozen nationalities, a boycott that triggered what we call today the Biennale offer in Dakar.
09:26 And the cultural press told me that I am the father.
09:30 Indeed, that's the history of this offer.
09:32 So, it's this question that I'm addressing today in Rabat, as part of this conference initiated by the CNDH.
09:40 And it's a great pleasure to try to popularize, to present to the world this claim,
09:48 which, let's say, is an unfinished word, but once again, we try to nurture and to bring it up,
09:59 because Africa also needs to be spoken about.
10:03 Because we have often spoken about Africa, and Africa has always listened to others,
10:07 what others have told about it.
10:09 So, today, Africa doesn't need to be spoken about to the world.
10:12 And I think that the contribution that I have come to make today in Rabat contributes to this philosophy, to this approach.
10:19 And thank you for making your voice heard, Zulu Mbaye.
10:23 It was a real pleasure to receive you.
10:25 Thank you again for being with us.
10:27 Thank you, Madam. Thank you.
10:35 And we continue this escalation of culture in the heart of Africa with Mamdira Nyang.
10:40 Born in 1982 in Lyon, she lives in Paris and is an autodidact photographer.
10:45 In her creations, she explores her concept of the plasticity of the territory.
10:50 The first personal exhibition of Nyang, "Salle Gris", took place at the French Institute of Dakar in 2013.
10:56 The practice of Nyang is characterized, it must be emphasized, by its sense of exploration,
11:01 its sense of the abstract and its somewhat subversive side through photography,
11:05 the moving image or the audiovisual installation.
11:09 Nyang has always been tempted by the notion of the plasticity of the territory,
11:13 a fundamental concept in its practice and which refers to our inner territory above all.
11:19 According to her own words, "I came to think of the me as a territory made of well-organized memories and erasures.
11:26 A place where the being itself is a forgotten monument, where even the conception of the most persistent identity
11:32 dissolves before us and we listen to Nyang in person."
11:36 I didn't choose this medium.
11:39 It came to me at a certain point in my life when I was burying my father and going back and forth to Senegal.
11:51 The only way I had between the event I was facing and my pain and loss was a camera.
12:03 So I took it and it started like that, to be able to process my memories, my emotions, thanks to that.
12:11 I don't think I chose anything. I think it just found me at that moment.
12:18 Nyang's story
12:23 The fact that I lived elsewhere forces me to always reconsider who I am.
12:38 I don't think in terms of identity, I think in terms of territory. I am a territory.
12:43 The fact that I travelled throughout my childhood forced me to reinvent myself and to be faced with a different population,
12:54 with a different language, and to have to meet other parts of myself.
13:01 These back and forth in this territory, for me, forged my artistic practice.
13:12 Nyang's work is about the will to write, to immortalise, to give a face to oblivion.
13:21 It's a journey into the interior space, a self-portrait in constant mutation.
13:25 The artist declares, "I sculpt the earth, I sculpt the living, I decontextualise,
13:30 then I reconstruct a territory with fragments of existing landscapes."
13:34 These questions are at the heart of Nyang's journey as an autodidact artist,
13:38 whose introspective process of creating images actively questions the conventions of documentary photography, but also portrait photography.
13:48 What I see is myself, it's the state of the place.
13:53 For example, in my first series, "Sahel Gris, Acde Nol et Metropolis", which is a trilogy,
14:05 it's a journey into mourning, the mourning of my father.
14:10 "Sahel Gris" begins on a desolate territory, an immense land,
14:20 and at the same time it's a place of construction where I'm wandering.
14:26 For me, it's the feeling I had when I arrived in Senegal and had to bury my father.
14:32 It was the place that left me.
14:37 It was how I felt.
14:41 I infiltrated this territory to the point of a wall.
14:47 To take up what you were telling me earlier, a wall,
14:50 the second series is called "Acde Nol".
14:52 So, we're at the wall.
14:54 It's a continuity,
14:59 it's not just a physical place where I take pictures,
15:05 it's always about me when I approach a territory in my work.
15:12 Nyang's interest in the notion of territory is also reflected in a representation of the landscapes
15:19 she rediscovered during her stay in Senegal after her father's death.
15:24 The places that are in front of Nyang's lens are both studied scientifically
15:29 and transformed into fabulous non-places.
15:31 Nyang's work "Mamdiarra" is a work of art.
15:34 It offers a pictorial universe that surprises us,
15:36 questions its goal, and moves its audience.
15:39 It addresses themes of great importance, such as oblivion, memory, and inner journey.
15:44 In fact, her entire work is based on her experience, her feelings, as she says,
15:48 her relationship with the world and the Other, her story to her, and a little bit of ours too.
15:53 We listen to Nyang in person.
15:57 It seems to me that we are all at the center of our own world, of our own universe.
16:04 I'm rather curious about the experience that the person will have in front of the images.
16:12 It's a circuit, it's a heresy that I propose,
16:16 and it can only unfold through the gaze of someone.
16:25 There are several stories, there are several paths.
16:29 My images are like a puzzle.
16:31 You have to compose this puzzle, and each person composes it in a different way,
16:36 whether it's a spectator, a curator, or...
16:40 It doesn't matter, it's always a different proposition.
16:44 So it's important to have a conversation about the experience that has been lived.
16:50 I don't like to take people's work by the hand.
16:54 It's much better to discover something hidden by yourself.
16:58 And we talk right away about cinema in Africa, in culture, with Asma El Moudir,
17:09 who was consecrated on Saturday, December 2, during the 20th edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival.
17:15 Indeed, for the first time, a Moroccan film, "The Mother of All Lies", by Asma El Moudir,
17:21 won the Golden Star of the festival.
17:23 The other Moroccan film in competition, "The Moths" by Kamal El Zaraq,
17:27 was rewarded by the jury for its first feature film.
17:31 Asma El Moudir chose a delicate theme to address the pitch,
17:35 to unravel the lies that are transmitted in her family,
17:39 through a model of her childhood neighborhood,
17:41 and through the figurines of each of her relatives.
17:43 She re-plays her own story, a threading metaphor,
17:46 which brings to light common wounds,
17:48 which intertwine history with a great "H" and personal history.
17:52 Let's watch the preview.
17:55 They hit me.
17:57 They hit me hard.
17:59 They hit me hard.
18:01 What do you do?
18:05 I'm a journalist.
18:08 I'm a director.
18:09 You're a journalist.
18:10 When did you start?
18:13 That was a dangerous day.
18:15 That day, I couldn't leave.
18:22 The truth is hidden.
18:24 The truth is hidden.
18:26 I was a smart body.
18:28 At the same age,
18:30 Fatima became a smart body.
18:34 I changed her image,
18:36 into a white and dark one.
18:38 I love you, I love you so much.
18:42 I love you, I love you so much.
18:49 [singing]
18:52 How many kids do you have?
18:58 I have...
18:59 How many?
19:00 I have...
19:01 Two?
19:02 I'm going to sleep now.
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23:53 *thud*