Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale

TM: Was it during the years in France that modern art, meaning post-World War I European art,came into your consciousness?

TD: Yes. I became very interested in modern painters. But before speaking of them I should mention Delacroix. He interested me greatly because of his colors. They were very different from people like Raphael, Ingres, and El Greco. And then there was Cezanne. He was everywhere in the French museums. But the absolute most was Picasso; what he was doing made an incredible difference to me. In Picasso all of painting, universal painting, is there for me. His imagination, his creative sense, interested me a lot.

TM:I get the impression that the African tradition, the Moslem tradition, and the FrenchEuropean tradition are all natural to you, that they all belong to you,and have formed you in a harmonious way without tensions and conflicts between them.

TD: Absolutely. I never felt conflicts in that way. I think people of my generation never had those conflicts. Because today people are caught up in social and economic problems. And also because I think today, as far as relationships between Africans and Europeans go, there are aspects that are very positive, as well as very negative ones.

To my perception, what's happening in Europe and America belongs to me. One day someone asked me what I thought about Picasso and other European painters and I said, "In France, I took what belongs to me. Picasso came and took things from my home, I went to France and took things that are mine." For me the European tradition was a way of reunderstanding my own civilization's value, because Europe after the First World War was having a crisis of imagination, a crisis of development in an artistic sense, a cultural sense. And they turned to Africa. I also understand that they used my heritage to develop their own,so why can't I take theirs, whatever is technically useful to me,to express myself?

TM: When you say that you went to France and took what belongs to you, you don't mean that you were taking back purloined elements of African culture but that you were taking elements of European culture which belonged to you in exchange for them.

TD:I am not limited to African culture—that would be absurd; it would be ridiculous for any African today to speak of Africanity or Negritude. What you are is in everything, it's in your spirit. As an African you can never live exactly like a European—at least the people in my generation, I'm not talking about the ones who will come later. Sometimes I say to myself, sooner or later there is going to be an upheaval, a spiritual crisis in Africa. Those who come later, I don't know what's going to become of them.

TM:When you say that you and the members of your generation do not feel the tension between Europe and Africa, do you mean because you were born, or anyway raised, in the postcolonial era?

TD: Yes,exactly. For example, I was with[Moustapha] Dime a little while ago. He speaks Wolof, and so do I. So we talked to each other in Wolof. When I go to see my relatives I speak in my own language, Bambara; when I am with a Frenchman I speak French.

TM:Wolof, Bambara, French, all these languages belong to you?

TD: Yes. There was a time when they said that we were going to choose a national language in Ivory Coast. Some asked if it should be Djula, but Ivoirians didn't want that because that language comes from Mali. Then there was talk about a Baule language, but tribal 61 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED