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2 Ghostly Stories InterviewswithArtistsinDakar andtheProductiveSpace aroundAbsence JoAnnA gRABskI Do we cite merely to repeat the words of the other, or do we do so in order to enact or reenact an inimitable gesture, a singular way of thinking, a unique manner of speaking? If the latter, then the quotation would in each case mark a limit, the place where the inimitable gesture of the dead friend becomes inscribed, and thus repeatable, comparable to other gestures. . . . Each time, citation would mark the beginning of a unique and singular life as well as its brutal interruption. —PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT AND MICHAEL NAAS, “TO RECKON WITH THE DEAD” Since the late 1990s, I have made several research trips to Dakar, where I reencounter the people who have made this space meaningful and purposeful for me. Just as our re-encounters are shaped by who is present, they inevitably involve exchanges about who is absent. I have come to think of absence as an increasingly significant, if not defining, theme in my research with artists in Dakar. While an artist’s absence is often attributable to travel for exhibitions or workshops, what I am talking about primarily is absence due to an artist’s death.1 During one stay in Dakar, I was struck by the various ways that such absence was registered and represented in exchanges with friends and colleagues: Abdoulaye Ndoye showed me the portrait silhouette he made of the late Moustapha Dimé (Figure 2.1); Fodé Camara wore a T-shirt dedicated to memorializing Djibril Diop Mambety (Figure 2.2); Oumou Sy called for a moment of silence to honor all those no longer with 26 Joanna grabski us during her opening remarks for the Semaine Internationale de la Mode de Dakar ; and Germaine Anta Gaye displayed the ex-voto boxes she made in homage to the late Ousmane Sembene. I take these examples to illustrate absence as a productive space that generates representational and interpretive practices. Insomuch as artists produce visual work reckoning absence, they also talk about and around it. My chapter extends this assertion to formal interviews and conversations with Dakar’s beaux arts practitioners to examine how absent artists are brought into the present, represented, and interpreted. Though I was not aware of it in real time, absence underwrote the dynamics of many interviews I undertook in Dakar, from those intended to garner information about deceased figures to conversations where artists spoke freely about one another because of the other’s absence. Like artists , art writers generate narratives around absence; it has been integral to projects where I have written texts about absent artists or relied on recorded interviews to mediate their absence. To frame absence in relation to interviews and narratives, I propose that we consider them as ghostly stories for they are generated around the absence of a physical body, and through them we give shape to something that once was, ensuring its presence and making it meaningful to the moment at hand. The analysis undertaken here not only posits absence as generating a productive space in interviews and narratives, it also examines how absence makes possible certain interpretive projects and representational undertakings. A second theme woven throughout this chapter is the exploration of how the narrative space around absence is constructed intertextually: I examine how interviews and other documents work together to produce interpretations around absence. In addition to considering interviews as a specific type of document, I posit interviews and documents as mutually intervening in the other’s purpose and possibility, each working with and within the other. In centering absence as a productive space, this chapter furthermore complicates assumptions that physical or material presence is the necessary condition for interviews. This issue becomes all the more pronounced when we consider the great distances we travel to get to our research sites and to interview artists in person or the substantial resources we devote to forging and negotiating these relationships. As Gupta and Ferguson have reminded us in their reevaluation of anthropology and fieldwork, conceptualizations of “the field” are constituted by expectations for fieldwork of which interviews and conversations are an integral part.2 This chapter thus extends scholarship explicating interviews as dynamic and fluid processes shaped by the conditions of an interview’s who, what, and where, and it has implications for thinking about how the social relations and material conditions of interviews work toward producing interpretive spaces.3 It is my hope that the theorization and analysis advanced here will prompt...

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