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Africa Pavilion - Senegal


Place d'Afrique

The pavilion of the republic of Senegal tries hard to illustrate a justifiable and exalting ambition, expressed one day by the president Léopold Sédar Senghor in the following terms: " become again, as our ancestors, producers of civilization ", because " the humanism of the 20th century, which can be only civilization of the Universal, apauvrirait if was missing there a single value of a single country, a single race, a single continent... "

We present in this pavilion some aspects of a culture, formerly prosperous in the Middle Ages and which expresses itself through the multiple forms of the ancestral crafts: ancient jeweller's shop, sculptures on beautiful wood, often of religious inspiration, where the artist philosophizes tries to translate in the wood of the guardian forest its concrete conception of the universal balance.

The "dialogue" with the cultures of industrial nations becomes intensified, the mode of expression diversifies. New sources of inspiration, new techniques, new needs are born.

And so appear dad Ibra Tal's very beautiful tapestries, and so we compared with the miracles of Aubusson in France, the surprising paintings of style and freshness, painted by young Senegalese artists. The crafts take two very different faces: whereas the development of the tourism creates an adapted and commercial shape of objects-memories, by reaction the upholders of the art for the art continue, in an almost mystic fervour, to chisel with love the masterpieces of the contemporary Senegalese art.

At the same time as this initiative of the traditional art, the activity of the poets and the writers engenders plentiful one literature: profane poems, tales and legends, novels, essays, religious papers in French and in Arabic.

The pavilion of Senegal reserves many other surprises to the observer eager to know a culture so varied and so charming.

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