Anna Binta Diallo
Anna Binta Diallo (born in Dakar, Senegal; lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada) examines visual cultures through the lenses of memory, nostalgia, and otherness. Inspired by her own life journey, at the crossroads of Franco-Manitoban and Senegalese heritages, her practice focuses on issues relating to identity. Through collage, her technique of predilection, she envisions cultural patrimony as a constellation in constant reconfiguration. Recollections, dreams, and forgotten stories converge in a personal encounter with global issues such as celebration of diasporic identities, consequences of historical traumas, the uprooting provoked by migration, and the need to attend to the symbiotic relations that connect us to other forms of life on Earth.
In the series Errances / Wanderings, Diallo creates immersive environments inhabited by human and animal figures composed of images from various sources: ethnographic documentation, historical photographs, scientific illustrations, maps, personal archives, and images taken from the Internet. A turtle with a galaxy-formed carapace and a cloaca made of flowers lingers, its long neck stretched toward two children with hybrid bodies. Like theatre sets, Diallo’s installations lend themselves to plays with perspective and assemblage that give birth to her characters, as the collages materialize the plurality of identities that dwell in them. From these choreographies of images, new meanings emerge: Diallo invites visitors to build their own narratives based on their experiences and references, drawing on what is shown in the works. The subversive nature of this approach resides in highlighting the value of a nonlinear, non-hierarchical history fed by oral tradition, folklore, and ancient cosmologies, as well as by scientific data and agricultural almanacs. Her compositions thus evoke the power of natural forces—ocean tides, astronomical cycles—and creation myths. Errances / Wanderings entangles different temporalities and outlines the overlapping of human, animal, and plant lives as well as the knowledge, stories, and experiences that flow from them.