LA MAISON SENTIMENTALE
BIENNALE DE DAKAR . DAKAR . SENEGAL
2016

Curator : Simon Njami

Increasingly, the glue of time slows the turning pages of a history with a small ‘h’, ranging from contemporary African art to contemporary African expressions. Paternal instinct fades and returns as filial instinct. Today, we are not the fathers of Revue Noire, but its children, so much has a span of time we thought eternal closed in around that venture of another way of knowing and discovering. Ultimately, with an unsuspected effect: lineage. The future?
The moulds of personal ambitions have replaced our plethora of collective ambitions. Yet without reducing the fertility of time, of each time. Sterility is still the persistent prerogative of our society, of those who think they can understand and control it by remaining at a distance and observing what can no longer be and even less will be. Attempting to put into words concepts that refuse to be confined to them. For the world of forms is genuinely the sphere of concepts that cannot be trapped in the equation of words without literature.

Here in Dakar for the biennale that has been so dear – even essential – to us since its creation, our concrete relationship is reaffirmed by Joël Andrianomearisoa. He has gathered the components he needed to build his ‘Sentimental House’ from both his personal world and the great library of partial or entire illustrations from Revue Noire,
Fragments, materials, words lost and found, a new music of forms in thousands of full and empty, small and vast pages accompany us through this long building transformed into a gallery. It is not a Hall of Mirrors reflecting our own image, but a promenade where we are plunged wholly into the depths of the mystery.

Jean-Loup Pivin