{"id":9202,"date":"2018-03-29T08:51:19","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T06:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/?p=9202"},"modified":"2020-10-20T16:55:59","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:55:59","slug":"the-broken-mirror-of-the-lagos-biennale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/geopolitics\/identity\/the-broken-mirror-of-the-lagos-biennale\/","title":{"rendered":"The broken mirror of the Lagos biennale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In October 2017, the city of Afrobeat and Nollywood, the chaotic window of a new economic and cultural miracle, gets ready to receive the first contemporary art biennale of its history. Entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/global-development\/2017\/oct\/26\/lagos-biennial-holds-mirror-to-gentrification-as-squatters-evicted\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Living on the Edge<\/em><\/a>, the event is looking at bearing witness to this paroxystic situation, by finding inspiration in shantytowns born out of the shortage of housing occurring in the city.<\/p>\n<p>The organizers of the biennale chose to set up the event in a vast disused railway shed, partly squatted by Nigerian families. Artists and squatters thus work with a common purpose on the transformation of the shed into an ambitious exhibition site. But, on the day of the inauguration, the Nigerian Railway Corporation, a national railroad company, starts a round of evictions aiming at the families occupying the premises. Thus ends the utopia of the contemporary art biennale of Lagos like a sinister mise-en-ab\u00eeme, real estate speculation that has property prices soar leaving the organizers of the artistic event attend, powerless, the evacuation, sometimes violent, of the occupiers, the artists and the works of art.<\/p>\n<p>The management of space has become a major stake in Lagos, the overcrowded capital, where several dozens of thousands of people were moved in 2016, chassed to the outskirts for lack of means. The shantytowns are razed to give space for luxurious properties intended for the new elite of the country. Far from art and humanity.<\/p>\n<div class=\"leftSepar2\"><\/div>\n<p>Translation by\u00a0<b>Anne-Sophie Lecharme<\/b><\/p>\n<h5>Cover image: works of art by Fati Abubakar, shown in the scope of the first art biennale of Lagos \u00a9 Tom Saater for the Guardian<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In October 2017, the city of Afrobeat and Nollywood, the chaotic window of a new economic and cultural miracle, gets ready to receive the first contemporary art biennale of its history. Entitled Living on the Edge, the event is looking at bearing witness to this paroxystic situation, by finding inspiration in shantytowns born out of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":9229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1844],"tags":[1869],"corpus":[],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1311],"class_list":["post-9202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-identity","post_types-chronique-en","authors-nicolas-vaquier"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9202"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=9202"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=9202"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=9202"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=9202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}