Mon Super Kilomètre

A long ribbon spreads out through the city, between Gueule Tapée and Medina. A ribbon which would seem like an Ariadne thread, a link between the various components of the city. The thread served Theseus to escape the cave of the Minotaur. It represented the path to salvation. My Super Kilometer is that ribbon. But here, it’s not about escaping from anything; the reverse is the case. It is an invitation for meeting, exchanging, and discovering. A discovery which is not linked to the great adventure we sometimes hear when addressing that word. Not a big show, nor a dense landscape, nor an unfathomable sea. Simply, human beings, focusing on aesthetics, oblige us to see the essence. My Super Kilometer is an open-air gallery which responds to the rhythm of the city. That city is Dakar and this gallery aims to break its social and aesthetic barriers. The painter appears alongside the fishmonger and the car mechanic. The photographer contends with the tea vendor and the tinker. The artist, whether recognized by academic institutions or not, takes up, on a daily basis, with both the handyman and the Fine Arts school alumnus.
Opposites, or at least what we could have defined as such, get closer and discover each other and contradict themselves, in a wise and civilized atmosphere of the palaver tree. Here is the city. The omnipresence of the city that gives it its vitality. A simple pleasure to be together for a moment that hopefully could last forever, as is the case in any meeting. And here is the collaborative objective of the UY077 collective having joined the Espace Medina collective: to serve as a book written to help us, not to better understand the inhabitants of Dakar, but to better understand ourselves. The art is not exclusive but inclusive. It is not the private property of someone else, self-proclaimed censors or dictator of good taste. It can be considered as a social link, a meta language in which everyone finds his or her own place. And it is absolutely not at random that the project Thread which means “fil” in French is joined in this human adventure, by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Simon Njami