Dakar’s Village des Arts is the place to be
Arts Lab’s 6 month experiment in Senegal, exploring how it’s model might work in a different environment, took Sara, the director, to Dakar’s Village des Arts. As one of the small number of artists-in-residence, she took over a temporarily-vacated studio for the duration of March. Working alongside contemporary Senegalese artists, many of them nationally and internationally well-known, not only provided an insight into how and where the visual arts sit in today’s West African culture, but turned out to be an inspiring environment in which to get much of her own painting done.
Today’s Village des Arts is the work place of up to 50 visual artists working across broad-ranging disciplines from painting, installation and sculpture, to film and photography, design and batik. An unusual, government-supported artist colony with a great history, the studios are free! It is therefore competitive to get in, as the strong curation shows.
The several rows of adjoined studios separated by shaded areas of trees, flowers and outdoor art, was created out of a former camp for Chinese workers who participated in the construction of Dakar’s first stadium in the mid 1980’s. Artwork spills from the studios to every inch of outdoor wall, floor and surrounding gardens.
‘The first Village des Arts was originally a simple squat initiated in1977 in Dakar by El Hadji Sy in an abandoned military camp. He was very quickly joined by nearly eight dozen freshly graduated students and professors from the nearby National Institute of the Arts of Senegal, who saw it as an opportunity to create their own working studios, and some of whom moved there with their families, despite the lack of running water and electricity. The village is managed by the community under the authority of a “village chief”. Perceived as unofficial, the Village, which welcomes painters, designers, photographers and sculptors from the second generation of post-colonial artists from Senegal, is in fact a place of research and experimentation which symbolizes a counter-culture to the very official Cité des Arts and representative of the “School of Dakar”. However, in 1983, Abdou Diouf had the village razed, arguing that Senegal’s priority was economic development.
The current version was established in 1998, outside the city centre in the Dakar suburb of Yoff. It hosts concerts and exhibitions, while artists and visitors discuss art in the open studios. The Village acquires a mythical dimension in the history of the arts of Senegal.’
Wikipedia
