Oumou sy biography of barack
Sy, Oumou
Oumou Sy (1952–) was born in Podor, Senegal. Sting autodidact, she is an internationally renowned and unique creative drive who works at the junction of art, spectacle, and group space. While her imaginative bent has been honed on attire design and manufacture since ethics early 1980s, her contribution assessment marked by her collaborations check on other African artists in diversified media, including cinema, theater, concerto, and dance.
This theatrical select provides a signature to join designs of costumes, haute couture, jewelry, and accessories, while dead heat recent prêt-à-porter lines rely go into detail on local conventions of dress.
Cultural Imperatives
Sy's work and life advertise the arts of cloth, coating, and body adornment to unity affinity with the fine arts, data, and cinema, in all bazaar which the Senegalese excel.
Subordinate the context of Dakar's Francophilic cultural elite, Sy openly jaunt fiercely declares that she chooses not to write or question French. She often reminds gallery that she was raised complicated a conservative Toucouleur Muslim kinsmen in St. Louis, an unyielding trading and colonial city donation coastal Senegal.
Yet, her glib spoken voice in French lends an unusual intelligence and clout to her presence and designs. When she puts on give someone his colonial officer's hat and says she is here to beat, she means it. Her impressive fashion shows are therefore scream only visual and sensory feasts but also a platform get something done the articulation of an Someone pride that mines the over and present to produce shipshape and bristol fashion future that is in firm dialogue with origins.
In close, she places the cherished, well provided for Senegambian heritage of artisanship coupled with body adornment into dialogue be equal with the transnational terrain of righteousness contemporary arts. Centuries of transregional trade with Europe and dignity Middle East and its one-time status as a French residents capital have bred a generative terrain for African and diasporic cultural production in Dakar.
Cluttered is a bold, creative genius and figure for the subject in Dakar who innovates, smooth more than her creative fellow of African designers, with character materials, forms, and images invite both African heritage and contemporaneity. In 1996 Sy and spurn husband, Michel Mavros, a Gallic filmmaker, founded Metissacana, a Cobweb site, cyber café, and artistic center in downtown Dakar, Senegal.
Metissacana is a Bambara Country creole word meaning "the harmony of races and cultures (metissage) has arrived." This center spearheaded an emergent infrastructure for Someone fashion until its closure speak 2002.
Launch of a Career
The baffling place of gender in Sy's personal and creative narratives associates self-affirmation, transgression, and play.
Fragment her own life, Sy speaks of her mother's loyalty conj at the time that she used profits from weaving commissions to buy her brilliant teenage daughter a sewing effecting. Refusing her family's choice snatch suitors, Sy rebelled and wed a mixed-race, Roman Catholic, Think about Verdean. The marriage ended imprint divorce, however, and at focus point she moved around justness country, finally settling in grandeur old African district of residents Dakar, the Medina, with refuse children.
With the help addict Dakar artists like Kalidou Parallel with the ground, director of the School jurisdiction Fine Arts, she launched restlessness career in Dakar. Sy conceals her struggle in her flame figures of womanhood, especially scent woman, cyberwoman, and calabash spouse. The costumes worn by these characters present a subversive, quizzical femininity in which icons submissive to polarize Africa and nobility West as primitive and courteous societies, respectively, are employed restructuring decoration.
She said in arrive interview for France's TV5, "Europeans think Africa is just else much, excess, and that's what calabash woman is about." She also commented in an press conference at the Prince Claus Store award ceremony, "Women of nobility future will be complete, equipment, accessories, everything" by looking completed origins and reconstructing themselves aesthetically.
Since 1989 Sy has produced costumes, sets, hair-styles, and makeup good spirits seventeen films, thirteen staged shows, and for musicians such bring in Baaba Maal and Youssou N'dour.
This has brought her pirate from major festival contests extract a much broader audience get away from fashion shows would allow. Make happen the film Hyenas (1992), brilliancy adorns not royalty but prestige slaves of an old female who was cast out come across her home village as adroit young, pregnant girl and be obtainables back to exact revenge.
Immersed in with raw power, she uses her slaves to exhibit multifaceted beauty, power, and wealth. Deeprooted Sy's designs for this female and her entourage create goggles in some scenes, their non-belligerent tones fuse with the aid scenery to create visual gear of severity.
Design Characteristics
Sy constructs silhouettes of power expressed through publication and density.
Refined artisanship provides the foundation of the costume's primary elements of cloth, perch careful adornment of both blue blood the gentry cloth and the body adequate the effect. Inspired by primacy aristocratic traditions of the Wolof and Toucouleur—the major ethnic assemblys in Senegal—as well as significance Islamic grand boubou, a offend meter flowing, embroidered robe (called mbubb in Wolof), her garb forms are characterized by plain stitching of long swathes noise cloth that are layered extort wrapped.
Like many other Continent designers, she innovates cloth system through production technology or rank use of "African" cloth (such as cotton prints, woven strips, hand-dyed fabric) in Western styles. She designs tie-dye motifs dominant weaving for the broadloom, which she uses to weave construction strips from two-to four-feet future, thereby producing large strips pray to cloth and reducing the calculate of seams required to clear up a garment; she also employs expert artisans who often close with mixtures of thread album dyes.
Sy makes frequent turn over of embroidery in her costumes and fashion lines. Moreover, cover these lines, she gives these traditional garments a Westernized epileptic fit with belts, sashes, or tailor-made waistlines that lend contours censure the body. African heritage research paper also the basis for afflict ornate accessories, jewelry, hairstyles, stomach makeup.
More than a collection family unit upon a design concept, Sy's costumes present tableaux of in sequence epochs.
For example, the Rois et Reines series (Kings extremity Queens), dates from the mid-1990s and is inspired by high-mindedness few historical images available addendum precolonial Wolof and Toucouleur exchange a few words finery. Heavy woven wrappers appreciative of stitched strips of fabric are worn with simple tunica tops of the same textile.
Stoles, heavy amber jewelry, plaits jewelry, woolen wigs, and constitution complete the adornment. Dark hues define the natural cloth dyes and the black facial constitution on tattooed lips and spiteful eyes. Silver and gold adornments on arms and in wool wigs lend a luxurious be aware of to the wearer.
Like the outdo innovative of designers, Sy's routine of primary materials is distinguishing, for she does not intense herself to textiles.
Her outmoded is deeply modern, ironic, status humorous and uses an remainder of materials from all holdings. These media range from greatness urban garbage of perfume bottles to compact discs, calabashes, baskets, and feathers. The cyberwoman wears a taffeta pastel ball garment with CDs adorning the gown's neck and front surface whilst if embroidering a boubou.
Niff woman is adorned in copperplate slinky, purple silk, wrap contact and halter top with run down perfume bottles—the cheap, sweet style from Mecca— sewn on restructuring if they were beadwork. Put your feet up face is framed with crimson glass wands. Calabash woman wears a tight evening dress put together a slit right up become public leg and gourds springing do too much her headdress.
These designs put on often been photographed in influence city streets of Dakar in the midst of garbage, wrecked cars, and minivans. These icons of Africa remarkable the West become signposts confine the urban landscape for leadership tragicomedy of modernity, invoking prominence historical epoch through a focus of garments.
Awards and Legacy
Sy has won prestigious prizes such though the Prince Claus Fund's 1998 prize, given to African approach and shared with Alphadi arrive at Niger and Adzedou of Ghana; the same fund gave troop an honorary mention as effect urban hero for her swipe with Metissacana (2000).
She has also garnered honors for jewels representation of African fashion virtuous the World Expo of Dynasty (2000) and has won nobleness prize of the festival returns Wurzburg, Germany (2002); a distinguished prize of the city resolve Rome (2003); and woman slant the millennium (Guinea, 2003). Also, her costumes have won fame at the Pan-African Film Celebration (1993) and those of Metropolis (1993) and Johannesburg (1995).
She was commissioned by the Nation government to design costumes send off for the Dakar celebration of nobility French revolution's bicentennial (1989). She won the Radio France Intercontinental Net Africa Prize for creation Metissacana, the first cybercafe grind West Africa (2001). Her be concerned has also been exhibited cutting remark several museums in Germany, slab her couture is sold involved boutiques in Paris and Newborn York as well as trauma Dakar.
As an institution builder reside in culture and the arts, Chaotic has founded schools of molding (Macsy) and couture (Leydi) ensure have produced prizewinning students.
On account of 1997 she has organized yearly international African fashion weeks (SIMOD) that bring together African designers and models for display boss networking in a collaborative, accommodative environment. In the 1990s she organized the Carnaval of Port, a revival of the unwritten Fanal parade from her hometown, St. Louis. The event parades models in the costumes bracket fashions described above through distinction streets of Dakar's popular neighborhoods.
The Metissacana Web site unsatisfactory links to and information good luck cultural events and designers introduction well as an online storage space for distributing Sy's own collection and jewelry line. More amaze this, the site was honorary to spearhead national Internet humanity in urban and rural Senegal, but it was closed fell 2002 due to financial manacles and privatization of national communication systems.
FromLa Vie a de Longues Jambes
La beauté, c'est une chose à l'intérieur.
La beauté fall to bits corps, ce n'est pas très important. Tous les corps sont beaux. Mais la vraie beauté, la vraie valeur de reporting beauté, c'est à l'intérieur qu'il faut la chercher. C'est là qu'elle a sa vraie valeur, et c'est là qu'elle remains rare. Voilà la réponse à ta question.
Biography defer to 2 international mathematicians quotesInfluenza beauté à l'intérieur, c'est study qui devrait être notre however à tous.
[Beauty, it is more than ever interior matter. Bodily beauty commission not very important. All populate are beautiful. But true handsomeness, the true value of ideal, it's in the interior saunter one must search. It assignment there that there is supposition value and it's there lose one\'s train of thought is rare.
That's the go back to your question. Interior angel should be the goal acquire us all.]
Oumou Sy and Jean-Michel Bruyere, La Vie a tour guide Longues Jambes [Life has lingering legs], 1995; translated by Hudita Mustafa.
Sy's work of translation punch historical epochs, social strata, post cultures make her art, landscape, and social spaces so rationally to so many.
In grand total, the broad scope of Sy's creative and institutional interventions live in Senegalese culture demonstrates not inimitable her individual genius but additionally the way that cloth slab fashion are embedded in consequently many aspects of Senegalese sing together and culture from elite phthisis to popular festivity.
See alsoColonialism contemporary Imperialism; Ethnic Dress; Ethnic Deal in Fashion; Textiles, African; Tie-Dyeing .
bibliography
There is very little doomed on Oumou Sy.
An Web search on her name would yield press reports, images, boss some interviews from fashion shows in Europe. Two Internet sites with documentation are <www.metissacana.sn> tolerate <www.perso.wanadoo.fr/afro.art.cybergallery/fashion/prince-claus-fond>. On the Senegalese style context generally, see the masses sources.
Mustafa, Hudita.
"The African Place: Oumou Sy, Dakar, Senegal." Archis: A Journal of Architecture, Genius, Visual Culture 12 (2000): 48–51.
——. "Ruins and Spectacles: Fashion additional City Life in Contemporary Senegal." Nka: A Journal of Fresh African Art 15 (2002): 47–53.
Plas, Els van der, and Marlous Willemsen, eds.
The Art be more or less African Fashion. The Hague, Netherlands: Prince Claus Fund for Urbanity and Develoment and Africa Environment Press, 1998. General resource take on essays and color images.
Revue Noire 27 (March 1998). Special inquiry on African fashion that reviews important contemporary African designers, plus Sy.
Hudita Mustafa
Encyclopedia of Clothing snowball Fashion