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246 Okwui Enwezor
development and empowerment, whereby “in the end the participants are
able to set up self-sustaining practices as non-dependent citizens.” 38
This approach is attempted as a subtle contradiction of the development
discourse, which recently has been the dominant vehicle for addressing
many African crises. The top-down, donor–client model of NGOs and
development agencies from wealthy Western countries has been perceived
as undermining Africa’s ability at nondependency. Oftentimes, development
organizations, through donor institutions, operate on the assumption of economic
and sociopolitical templates that can be domesticated within an African
context, transforming the templates as it were into substrates of an
authentically African ideal. As such there is the preponderance of support for
an aesthetic of recycling, the make-do, makeshift, and bricolage rather than
invention, sophistication, and technologically sound transfer of knowledge. 39
In short, development has given rise to the spectacle and excess of Tokunbo 40
culture, whereby discarded and semifunctional technological objects and
detritus of the West are recalibrated for the African market. From used cars
to electronics, from biotechnology to hazardous waste Africa has become the
dumping and test ground for both extinct Western technology and its waste. 41
All of these issues come up in the analysis of the political-social-cultural
economy of Senegal by Huit Facettes.
On a certain level, this approach may in certain quarters be perceived
as naive. However, Huit Facettes is under no illusion that its work
makes any difference beyond its ability to establish a particular type of social
context for communication between itself and different communities in Senegal,
be it in its other campaign to raise public awareness on the AIDS pandemic
or in their participation as individual artists in the urban renewal
project of Set Setal during the early 1990s in Dakar. The conception of art
on the basis of activism is one in which its statements have been soundly
equivocal. According to Kan Si, in the view of Huit Facettes:
Artistic work that aspires to engage with social issues . . . contributes in one way or another
to the development of the ”real world,” only much will depend on the nature of that work.
Such contribution will have to be perceived differently and in a wider sense, just as the
notion of a work of art can be understood more in terms of process than as Wnished cultural
object, to be instantly consumed (seen, appreciated, or indeed judged). Society’s concerns
become the medium for an intervention, if only suggestively, for a formula through
which we may engage with and seek solutions to problems encountered in everyday life. 42
By forcing themselves to confront the incommensurable in the relationship
between the ethical and the aesthetic, between the subject and the state,
Huit Facettes and Le Groupe Amos operate in the vanguard position of a new
type of debate within the contemporary global public sphere. As we know,
all activities, events, and practices of art are grounded in speciWc paradigm