Adji Dieye

What is your background?

I studied New Technologies at the Brera Art Academy in Milan and then I moved to Switzerland for a Masters in Art and Politics at the ZHDK in Zurich.

When did you start working on Maggic Cube and what was your inspiration?

In 2015 I started thinking about propaganda and publicity, looking in particular at West Africa, from where I - an Italian-Senegalese - come from and where I travelled a lot. Looking around a city like Dakar you cannot avoid noticing the ads and in particular I was struck by the ones for Maggi stock cubes. This is one of the first Western products that entered the African market, and penetrated it so strongly that it became a key product in most traditional dishes. Its benefits are clear: it is cheap, it resists high temperatures, but nobody speaks of its consequences on the health of the population, which has seen an increase in high blood pressure. But what I found interesting was the visual and representational aspect of these ads, which have aggressively appropriated of elements of the local tradition and identity to make them their own. It is such a strong publicity that informs the local tradition and to transform the social archetypes.

In my work I combined this imagery with another West-African legacy, portrait photography which - since artists like Malik Sidibé or Seydou Keïta have become so strong in the art market - has become like a brand. The results are studio portraits in which women are entrapped in a "Maggic" world, where their role is limited to cooking and being "the star of the kitchen".

The topic of representation in Africa returns in another work, Red Fever...

Yes, also Red Fever started in Dakar, in the Ouakam neighborhood, in 2018. Here is a very well-known monument: The African Renaissance Monument, a nearly 50-meter-tall bronze statue located on top of a hill, representing a man holding a woman in one arm and a child in the other. I started researching its history and discovered that it was built between 2006 and 2010 by Mansudae Overseas Projects, a North Korean company that has built extensively throughout Africa. How come? It is a legacy of the relationship between Senegal and North Korea in the aftermath of the Independence, when in many parts of Africa, Socialism was seen as the only solution after Colonialization and Imperialism. After the collapse of the Urss, the company remained and left its mark on Africa through monuments that have since become part of the local cultural heritage, but have also been a way to finance North Korea.

What kind of artwork came out of this research?

My work is mainly based on photography, but I never show my photographs in frames. They become large installations. I see it as photographic experiments. Also, Red Fever is an ongoing project that goes in many directions, including Brutalist architecture.

What are you working on now?

I am at the beginning of a project focussing on construction sites in Dakar, which are

in every corner of the city. This process of construction causes problems of gentrification in certain neighbourhoods, pushing whole populations to the periphery. I cannot say more for now.