Senegal/France 2014, cut, braided, and coated rubber tires, on castors, incised signature: AME, height approx. 80 cm, width approx. 310, depth approx. 60 cm. (DRAX)

A unique piece.

Lit.:
cf. Making Africa. A Continent of Contemporary Design, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein 2015, pp. 246/47 (comparable examples), p. 333 (biography).

The exemplary exhibition “Making Africa” of the Vitra Design Museum will be shown at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, in autumn 2017 and in 2018 will travel to the Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico, and to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

“I was born on 14 June 1977 in Yoff (a fishing village in the suburbs of Dakar), my dad sculptor on ebony and my mother a nurse. A turbulent child, I have always been attracted to the idea of recovery. My dad has handed down the Baye Fall tradition to me. A Senegalese tradition stemming from Islam, Baye Fallisme advocates ‘non-waste’ work, recovery, and sharing. Thus, since childhood, I have been aware of the importance of materials (natural, industrial, or manufactured) that are made available to us. So, recycling for me is neither an ecological nor a political option, it is rooted in me. It brings me a primitive relation to matter. Matter, more than the object, has a history of its own.
To obtain the best is a sensation felt only by the manual workers. This subject chose me in 2011. I dedicated one year to the creation and complete decoration of ‘African Tempo’ in Dakar, a Gallery Restaurant completely decorated and furnished with tires. Following the Off of the Dakar Biennale of Arts in 2014, two of my creations were selected by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein (Germany) as part of their permanent collection and participated in the international exhibition ‘Making Africa’.

This exhibition travels from the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to Atlanta via Barcelona and Rotterdam. The selection was essential for the decision to expatriate myself in France, in order to present my work on this new territory. Possessing a fairly imposing and extremely sporty body (as a former weightlifter), in my artistic career I quickly opted for a subject with which I would have to fight a fight. The tire is an exciting material: imperishable, handy, resistant, and ‘alive’. I liked to learn how to handle, braid, and assemble the material: the tire, indispensable accessory to our locomotion (car, bike, etc.), agricultural production (tractor, lawnmower, etc.), and leisure (quad, motorcycle, etc.). Sports cars, vintage cars, armament – the tire is useful, it is the creator of industrial employment (creation/destruction). But it is also the ugly duckling of waste, difficult to recycle outside the industry and badly loved. That is what motivates me, this matter everybody prefers to forget when it has left our roads. I try to magnify it. What joy, even enjoyment, when someone approaches one of my pieces, touches it discreetly or asks me ‘I can touch it?’ And his astonishment: ‘Are they real tires?’ An autodidact, I create without plan, instinctively. The creative act is for me a form of spirituality indispensable to my balance. I settle in my studio, I turn on the music and enter into communion with my subjects. I cut, I saw and saw, and then all is assembled and fits. In this way the premises of a sculpture, an object, a piece of furniture […] are born.” (Amadou Fatoumata Ba)

© jean-baptiste joire