N’Goné Fall
- N’Goné Fall
This interview was conducted July 16, 2018, shortly after a week-long intense brainstorming retreat that N’Goné Fall convened and I was part of in St. Louis, Senegal, in preparation for “Africa Season 2020.” As part of Karen Milbourne’s ongoing project dedicated to women who have contributed to changing the structures by which Africa’s modern and contemporary art is seen and understood, I was invited to interview N’Goné Fall, which is another way the project encourages conversations between women in the arts. Fall has, from the late 1970s through to the current day, played significant roles as an architect, art editor, curator, teacher, mentor, and facilitator of cultural initiatives the world over, with a vested focus on Africa. This conversation highlights moments of Fall’s impact in art worldwide and some of the strategies she has employed over the years, in her ongoing project to bring integrity and purpose to artistic practice and scholarship on a continent as huge as Africa. To N’Goné Fall, art is a bridge that moves beyond entertainment to more critical areas of research, discourse and collaboration.
To begin our conversation, it may be important to start with getting a sense of where you have been—and, where you are going. My first question concerns the impact you have made on the art world: Could you describe how and when your art career began, and what motivated you to pursue an art-oriented career?
Well, okay, I think my interest in the arts goes back to when I was young, and a teen in Dakar in the mid ‘70s to the mid ‘80s. Back then we had a generation of filmmakers, writers, social scientists, political scientists, visual artists who were researching, thinking, and defining modernity and doing really interesting work. It was a generation of people born right before independence or right after independence and who, in the 1960s, were very young or maybe young teens during the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. It was a time we witnessed creative people or groups coming from all over the world, making statements via artistic and cultural productions in Dakar. I think this was the starting point. There were instances where filmmakers like Djibril Diop Mambéty and senior filmmaker Sembène Ousmane would meet at the yard of artist Joe Ouakam to discuss each other’s work and politics.
It was a challenging time for a young country—ten to fifteen years after independence—and I always saw those spaces and places as spaces of freedom. I didn’t really understand everything that was going on when Joe Ouakam was doing stuff in the yard. Today, I know he was doing installations and performances. Others were reading and writing poetry, but sometimes it was a little bit challenging to understand, especially as a teenager of 12 or 13 years old. In hindsight, I think it had a bigger impact than I thought, in my mind. The cultural landscape was very, very vibrant in those days, in the seventies, including the Musée Dynamique [Museum of Modern Art], etc. So, it’s no surprise that I ended up seeing culture as a tool for emancipation and self-determination.
I guess that is why I also always wanted to be an architect since I was 8. This was very clear in my mind—making architectural plans and not drawing houses like a kid would do, but really, really making plans. When I graduated, my graduation project was a museum on the history of Africa and how it relates to the history of African diaspora, looking at migrations through the slave trade routes on the continent. I think it was the earlier experiences that led me to my graduation project. I wanted to create a place where people can research, think, and produce—you know—using culture as an avenue. I really, really enjoyed the research I did for [End Page 60] that graduation project. It dove into the history of slavery on the continent, all the trade routes and all the connections...
