Screening: The Ghost Fair Trade (2022)

• Movie, Cinema, TV
• Exhibition

The Ghost Fair Trade, (2022), Laurence Bonvin und Cheikh Ndiaye, 38min.

In 1960, Léopold Sédar Senghor became the first president of the newly independent state of Senegal. He had an ambitious political vision for his country, which included a strong focus on culture and the development of a Senegalese style of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Ten years later, he nonetheless invited two French architects, Jean-François Lamoureux et Jean-Louis Marin, to design the Senegal International Center of Foreign Trade (CICES) in Dakar. The result was a modernist masterpiece inspired by Senghor’s notion of asymmetrical parallelism, which espoused repetition and variations of forms, and included references to African patterns, local materials, and collaboration with local artisans. Construction was completed in 1974 when the first International Trade Fair of Dakar opened its doors. Today, some fifty years later, the site remains exceptional, despite having lost its original sheen and fallen into disrepair. If the political program that underpinned its construction and the program of modernism itself have since faded to the point of becoming ghosts, they might not be the only ones there. The site seems to have been inhabited by invisible presences for a much longer time, reminiscences of the animist culture of the Lébou people, the former owners of the place, who might have not been fairly compensated for their land despite their yielding attitude in the trade.