142, RUE MÈRE YACINE — Mabeye Deme

Photographs by Mabeye Deme

16 x 24 cm / 112 pages / June 2022

isbn 978-2-35137-327-9

In French only

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The photographs that make up the ‘142 rue Mère Yacine’ series take on a whole new meaning, from the montage of a sequence that runs from 11.45 am to 4.32 pm, to others that span several days, weeks and months. Time passes in a street in a working-class suburb of Dakar, where housing estates are expanding rapidly, in step with property speculation.

Away from the big building sites, a modest building is under construction at 142 rue Mère Yacine. For three years, between 2018 and 2021, it will be transformed before our very eyes, at the pace of the owner's missing savings, slowly. The images, as if worn and damaged by time, were taken from inside a fabric tent on the pavement opposite, in the usual way of temporary tents used for baptisms, weddings, deaths, wakes, parties and meals. Folded, unfolded, refolded, sewn back together, these tents are erected and dismantled right on the street, for the duration of the ceremonies: a temporary place that both conceals and makes the photographer highly visible, it is an ephemeral plastic device that is at the same time related. In the neighbourhood, people know that this is the photographer's tent.

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Born in Tokyo in 1979, Mabeye Deme lives and works between Dakar and Grenoble. After studying cinema at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, he has been working since 2012 on plastic and documentary photography in the streets of Dakar and on the relationship between photographer and photographed.