Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani | Binta Diaw. La plage noire

essay by Simone Frangi

First solo show at #prometeogallery of the artist #bintadiaw who presents the image of the mangrove as a symbol of the possibility of getting free together

opening: October 6, 2022 at 18:00

October 7 – December 6, 2022

Via Privata G. Ventura 6, Milan

www.prometeogallery.com

Milan, September 28, 2022. From October 6, 2022, the artist Binta Diaw (Milan, 1995) presents for the first time in the spaces of Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani her solo exhibition La plage noire, a reflection on the theme of freedom, not absolute and individual, but conceived as relational, closely linked to the concept of emancipation, at the center of her production for the last five years. Diaw materializes this complex thought through the figure of the mangrove, whose tangle has historically been a marron refuge, a new place of sociality and political reorganization.

The aesthetics and physicality of the mangrove, its dual form of life suspended and rooted between water and air, and its capacity for multidirectional evolution are a source of inspiration for the artist's plastic reflection and a starting point for the creation of her installations.

The mangroves, realized by Binta Diaw out of synthetic hair, float lightly in shallow pools of stagnant water and take up, by relaunching them, the considerations addressed in earlier installations, such as Dïàs p o r a (2021), which traced the journeys of African women in diaspora encrypted in the tangles of their hairstyles, Uati's Wisdom (2020), where weaves of hair created symbolic architectures, or Black Powerless (2017 - ongoing), a reflection on the censorship of postcolonial bodies in their legitimate desire for citizenship and cohabitation in Italy.

The mangrove beach exhibited in this solo show is a reflection on the possibility of being rooted despite movement, or rather, because of it. The mangrove is indeed a rooting entity that grows at marginal latitudes that rejects the idea of a single root in favor of a dynamic, systemic, multi-potential territorialization. For the artist, the symbiotic growth of mangroves is thus the architecture of an alliance collectivity that always proceeds together.

Just as Rivers Solomon's novel The Deep celebrates an underwater world born of the heirs of the pregnant women thrown into the Atlantic by slave ships, so Binta Diaw celebrates that under and over-sea world made possible by the morphology of these extraordinary plants, which replicate the long underground roots in the mirrored structure of the branches stretching skyward.