Joanna Grabski

Making Fashion in the City: A Case Study of Tailors and Designers in Dakar, Senegal

Abstract This article examines the interface between fashion production and the visual experience associated with urban life in Dakar, Senegal. It focuses on tailors and fashion designers to explore how their relationship to the city informs their creative practices and the processes of making fashion. Both tailors and fashion designers locate their creative practice in Dakar by attributing their engagement with the citys visual and conceptual matrix as fundamental to fashion making. In addressing the interplay between fashion production and the urban environment, this discussion further considers the dynamics of artistic positioning and the complex intersections between local and global inflections. This analysis underscores the imbrication of fashion in Dakar and the citys conceptual and visual landscape, the street and the mass media, and finally dialogues within and beyond Africa. Not only do fashion makers select visual and conceptual elements from the urban ocular field. By creating new propositions for visual consumption, fashion makers also ever- constitute visual experience in Dakar.

Market logics: how locality and mobility make artistic livelihoods in Dakar

This essay addresses two questions linking artists and market spaces in Dakar. First, what do access, proximity, and the representation of locality have to do with the art market? And, secondly, how do markets, networks, and mobility produce and structure artists as a professional category in Dakar? The analysis and theorisation proposed here aligns Dakar’s art market with the city’s other markets as a transactive and productive space. In doing so, this essay also contends with dismissive assessments about the art market in Dakar as inadequate or fledgling. The practices of two artists, Fally Sene Sow and Douts Ndoye, orient discussion of the relationship between artists and markets by focusing specifically on how artists gain mobility and access to multiple networks and opportunities by way of market logics.

Pap Ba's Haute Couture Fashion Photography

Pap Ba (born Dakar 1957) is one of a relatively small number of photographers working in Dakar. Many Dakar-based visual artists incorporate photography into their cross-media practices, but only a handful work exclusively as professional photographers. Having first studied photography in 1977, Ba began his professional itinerary in 1981. His training is broad and inclusive of formal and informal opportunities in Senegal, as well as Canada, France, Germany, and Nigeria, where he studied techniques associated with analogue and digital photography, as well as aerial photography, photojournalism, and photogrammetry. Over the years, Ba’s photographs have been published in a number of international newspapers, academic journals, and popular magazines, such as Allgemeine Zeitung, Amina, Fashion Theory, and Revue Noire. The body of Ba’s photographic work encompasses a range of locales and themes, from urban scenes to rural landscapes, as well as portraits and fashion photography. His work moves between intellectual interrogation, social critique, and poetic musing around the artistic interplay of visual forms and cultural narratives. Ba’s 2007 exhibition and book, Senghorama, was a project of photo-poésie, an exploration of the dialogue between poetry and contemporary visual production.1 This collaborative project included twenty-seven visual artists and poets who used photography and poetry to question how words inspire pictures and how pictures extend words. Ba’s work is centered primarily in Dakar, where he is also the founder of Souf Communication (a press agency), Fotobi (a photo agency), and Edit’Art (a publishing house). Since his first engagement photographing a fashion show at Dakar’s Hotel de l’Indépendence in 1984, Ba has been one of the primary Dakarbased photographers of the city’s haute couture fashion scene. He was also an instrumental participant, as both photographer and model, in the fashion competition Ciseaux d’or in 1985. Ba sees his role as photographer as one element in a lengthier multi-stepped set of interactions comprising fashion production, where many artists work together towards a common purpose. Following the origination of designs, their execution, and their presentation, fashion photography is the final step before circulating and consuming the images. Ba’s work on fashion exemplifies his interest in the medium’s capacity to document and represent cultural expression and its displays. The photographer has identified an important convergence between his work in portraiture and fashion photography. Both forms represent the power of images to catalyze popular imagination about self-presentation and aspirant identities. At the same time, this body of photography recognizes and highlights the significance of fashion, dressing well, and aesthetic evaluation to life in Dakar.2 Clothing and self-presentation are important topics of everyday conversation in Dakar and many Dakarois devote substantial resources and time to looking fashionable. Many types of clothing figure into Dakar’s visual field: from the custom-made work of tailors to imported new and second-hand clothing and the more exclusive designs of internationally admired haute couture designers, such as Diouma PaP Ba’s Haute Couture FasHion PHotograPHy

Dakar’s Market Imaginary: Mobility, Visuality, and the Creative Economy of Second Chances

My concern in this essay is with the concepts that produce the market imaginary in the city of Dakar, Senegal. In particular, this essay centers on a cluster of questions: how might we characterize something as intangible and abstract as the market imaginary in this particular city? How do the individuals involved in its imagining situate and articulate its relevance? And, how Home / Borderlines / Dakar’s Market Imaginary: Mobility, Visuality, and the Creative Economy of Second Chances about the journal comparative studies of south asia, africa and the middle east (cssaame) seeks to bring region and area studies into conversation with a rethinking of theory and the disciplines. the journal is committed to working across temporal divides and asking how concepts and practices might be rethought and redeployed through new narratives of connection and comparison

DOUG FISHBONE (director), Elmina . Flatbush Films, in partnership with Revele Films, 2010.

when other Christian organizations were distancing themselves from the ruling party, ZAOGA began to court it. The church and Mugabe lent legitimacy to one another in a reciprocal assimilation of elites. Evangelism, however, was always the church’s overriding concern, and so from the early 2000s, when state violence and economic instability threatened its mission, ZAOGA members were advised to vote MDC. African Gifts of the Spirit tells two stories. The first is a tale of leadership, and its journey from egalitarianism to authoritarianism, patrimonialism, and personality-led Christianity, which mirrors the power dynamics that are dominant in both civil society and the state. The second tells the story of the social and spiritual lives of the citizens of a failing state who are confronted daily by the opportunities and disappointments of modernity. For all of ZAOGA’s internal contradictions and complexities –which do little to advance the cause of democracy in civil society or the state – the church continues to grow because it gives hope to thousands of ordinary people. African Gifts of the Spirit is a thoroughly researched, convincingly argued and beautifully written book. It is a hugely important contribution to current debates about the public role of Christianity in Africa. Published in 2006, the book does not chronicle the most recent of Zimbabwe’s struggles; nonetheless, Maxwell offers a fascinating insight into the struggles of ordinary Christians living in one of Africa’s harshest regimes.