New - for the sixth Dakar Bennale, the Laboratoire Debelinisation presents:
AFRO - getting around
a brand new edition of 3 AFRO bills in denominations of 5, 10 and 100 AFRO will be launched on the 11th of May 2004 in the museum of the BCEAO (Central Bank of the Nations of East Africa) in downtown Dakar, Senegal.
This is a second edition of the pschyo-social media intervention pioneered by Mansour Ciss and Baruch Gottlieb, artists taking the offensive in giving real living form to elusive, often inarticulate hope for a prosperous and peaceful Africa.
To this end, Gottlieb and Ciss present images of an africa already thriving through continent-wide large-scale collaboration.
The main theme of this edition is physical infrastructure of the kind taken for granted in the developed countries.
Css and Gottlieb postulate a massive, comprehensive and up-to-date arterial net of tranportation in full functionality allowing all nations of Africa unprecedented access to eachother's resources, human and natural.
The growth of this infrastructure if a metaphor for Africa re-colonizing itself, extending prosperity and opportunity from coast to coast to coast to cape.
Of course, this is first and foremost a work of media art, integrating a variety of mass-printing techniques, this and other websites, mass-media and structural interventions in public space and in the art space into an experiential paradigm Baruch Gottlieb has termed psycho-social media-art.
The bills themselves are lovingly crafted, with rich imagerial content and an array of 'security features' to ensure authenticity.
Xaliss
Bou
Bess
Wari
BE
Kosobe
