Loositoo

Curatorial Statement

“When memory goes looking for dead wood, it brings back the bundle that pleases it…” 

—Wolof idiom attributed to Birago Diop 

For Birago Diop, the bundle of wood becomes a vessel of deliverance for a people who have lost their sense of discernment.

Memory, for Diop, is selective. Like a bundle of wood, it opens a vast and evocative universe—laden with moral imperatives inherited from ancient thinkers. To remember is to act with prudence. In this view, memory is not a closed archive, but an open door to imagination. As Toshio Shimano reminds us, “spilled water cannot return to its recipient.” 

In other words, it is precisely because time is irreversible that alea jacta est carries weight. The identity of the lost object gains meaning in its absence—it becomes fertile ground for creation.

Art, in this sense, is a posture of memory. The shared desire to live together also speaks through memory; it anchors itself first in a common geography. 

The Senegalese Pavilion is a visual articulation of this ever-renewed geography—a geography that is plural and shifting. Like a map whose physical boundaries are constantly exceeded by imagined, emotional, and psychic territories.

Loositoo is the bundle of wood that feeds the flame and rekindles the cycle of life. 

It is the potential latency which gives meaning to our world-building. We are all humans. The political regions aim to valorize the natural region, which are visual pretexts in the Senegal Pavilion. They merge and distinguish themselves from other regions less tangible but very real.

Written by Massamba Mbaye (english)

French text found below