Conference Presentations by Delphine M . M . Buysse
Art Spaces and Institutions as Sites of Futurity
Sharjah Art Foundation
- March Meetings 2024
De l’influence des discours inauguraux de Senghor dans la promotion de la négritude
ENS/ITEM/UCAD
Senghor et la promotion de la négritude
Représentations du féminin dans le cinéma sénégalais et les séries
Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Cultures et les Identités
THÈME : Le corps comme ... more Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Cultures et les Identités
THÈME : Le corps comme objet de discours et de pratiques
Continuités et discontinuités de Bandung à travers les pratiques et les discours de l’art contemporain au Sénégal.
CONFEST Africa-Asia 3: new axis of knowledge
- Other Forms of Solidarity: From Diplomacy to Arme... more CONFEST Africa-Asia 3: new axis of knowledge
- Other Forms of Solidarity: From Diplomacy to Armed Struggle
Papers by Delphine M . M . Buysse
Contemporary Art Magazine, 2021
NEWS CONVERSATIONS EXHIBITIONS ESSAYS ' OPPORTUNITIES ' SUMMER EDITIONS ' PUBLICATIONS ' PROJECTS... more NEWS CONVERSATIONS EXHIBITIONS ESSAYS ' OPPORTUNITIES ' SUMMER EDITIONS ' PUBLICATIONS ' PROJECTS ' SHOP '
Delphine Buysse explores how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with artistic creation in Africa, emphasizing both critical engagement and structural inequalities. Focusing on the 2021 Afropixel Festival in Dakar, she highlights how artists and cultural actors used exhibitions, workshops, and conferences to confront algorithmic biases and address the global asymmetries embedded in AI technologies—often dominated by Western corporate and epistemic frameworks. Buysse critiques the cultural appropriation of African visual heritage, particularly through the example of the French collective Obvious, whose AI-generated African masks raise unresolved questions around authorship, power, and exploitation. She underscores how cognitive and racial biases in AI systems, as well as exploitative labor practices in the Global South, reinforce existing hierarchies. The article also sheds light on African-led initiatives such as Masakhane and Deep Learning Indaba, which aim to decolonize AI by fostering research in African languages and local contexts. Ultimately, Buysse argues for a critical and situated use of AI in the arts—one that acknowledges its political, ethical, and cultural dimensions, and centers African agency in shaping technological futures.
Catalogue d'exposition - Exhibition's booklet, 2024
Exhibition's review for OH Gallery: UnReclaimed
- Emmanuel Tussore
In this critical text, Del... more Exhibition's review for OH Gallery: UnReclaimed
- Emmanuel Tussore
In this critical text, Delphine Buysse analyzes Emmanuel Tussore's Unreclaimed as a visual meditation on traumatic memory, absent bodies and the ruins of the contemporary world. The installation, conceived in situ in the remains of the Maginot Building in Dakar, places the question of loss and the unrecovered at the heart of a reflection on systemic violence - colonial, ecological and migratory. Here, Tussore continues the work he began several years ago, combining an aesthetic of materials (rubble, cement bags, dust) with a poetics of absence. Through a series of intuitive gestures, the artist exhumes “gisants”, petrified figures of unclaimed victims, while evoking collective narratives of disaster and survival. The text also traces the key stages of Tussore's relationship with Dakar, including Sirènes (2016), Study for a Soap (2018), De Cruce (2022) and Birdhouse (2023), works in which the question of the body - displaced, engulfed, erased - is a constant. The Unreclaimed project reactivates these motifs in a highly symbolic location: the Maginot building, a colonial edifice commissioned by Crédit Foncier in the 1950s and now abandoned. Buysse sees it as a repository of intersecting memories, a place of mourning, contemplation and critique. At the crossroads of visual archaeology, funerary rite and political gesture, the installation embodies an attempt at symbolic reparation, in an aesthetic that blends the brutality of the material with the subtlety of the narrative. The author underscores the work's evocative power, between apocalyptic installation and homage to the invisible, sacrificed or forgotten dead, and places Tussore's approach within a genealogy that blends spirituality, materiality and postcolonial commitment.
Art Journal, 2024
In her article published in On Curating (Issue 58, 2024), Delphine Buysse offers a critical analy... more In her article published in On Curating (Issue 58, 2024), Delphine Buysse offers a critical analysis of the shifting landscape of cultural funding in Dakar, examining the tensions between international donor dependence, weak public cultural policies, and emerging strategies of autonomy developed by local actors. She argues that, since independence, Senegalese cultural policy has lacked coherence and continuity, resulting in an informal and under-resourced sector heavily reliant on externally driven, project-based funding mechanisms that often fail to reflect local artistic realities. Buysse draws on the case of RAW Material Company to illustrate an alternative institutional model rooted in financial autonomy, long-term programming, and a critical stance toward donor agendas. According to her, RAW has managed to build a space for artistic and curatorial freedom by resisting instrumentalisation and rethinking funding relationships beyond utilitarian logics. She also analyzes the evolution of the Dak’Art Biennale, noting that while it has diversified its partnerships, it still suffers from structural opacity and inequity. The author ultimately calls for a reconfiguration of support systems in the cultural sector based on the notion of the commons, advocating for funding models grounded in co-construction, critical solidarity, and locally anchored frameworks that move beyond extractive aid paradigms.
Rountable by Delphine M . M . Buysse
Du Spectre des Ancêtres en devenir à Mutikkappatata : relier les fractures coloniales
Rountable, 2025
CONFEST Africa-Asia 3: new axis of knowledge
- Inde-Indochine-Afrique : Migrations Et Diasporas ... more CONFEST Africa-Asia 3: new axis of knowledge
- Inde-Indochine-Afrique : Migrations Et Diasporas Asiatiques
Artichoke Magazine - n°21, 2025
This roundtable discussion, featured in Artichoke 21, brings together curators, educators, and de... more This roundtable discussion, featured in Artichoke 21, brings together curators, educators, and designers based in Dakar, Mendrisio, Providence, and Hong Kong to explore how creative practices are evolving in decentralized cultural environments. Delphine Buysse and Ndeye Filly Gueye, both curators at RAW Material Company (Dakar), contribute insights into how postcolonial, Pan-African, and decolonial frameworks shape contemporary art in Senegal and beyond. At the heart of the Dakar-based RAW Material Company lies a commitment to redefining curatorial and institutional practices from within African contexts, challenging inherited models of cultural production shaped by colonial and postcolonial state ideologies. As Delphine Buysse explains, RAW was founded as a response to the limitations of public cultural institutions and the “diplomatic version of art” promoted under Léopold Sedar Senghor. Rather than perpetuating official narratives, RAW aimed to cultivate a critical, open space for rethinking artistic agency on the continent. According to Buysse, RAW offers “alternatives to what had become the heritage of Senghor’s diplomatic version of art,” by promoting new forms of creation anchored in local experiences and transnational dialogue. Buysse highlights RAW's practice of constant institutional self-questioning as both a strategy of renewal and a form of resistance to external injunctions. She describes the RAW Académie, for instance, as an experiment born from a pause in programming—a time taken to rethink not only the content but also the form and ethics of cultural transmission. This ethos of interruption and recalibration, rooted in local conditions and needs, underpins RAW’s refusal to conform to Western models of legitimacy. It positions the institution not on the margins of global culture but as a generator of its own frameworks, advancing endogenous practices and solidarities across the Global South. Ndeye Filly Gueye, also a curator at RAW, complements this view by emphasizing the fluidity of Senegalese cultural identity, shaped by oral traditions, historical layering, and shifting modes of belonging. For her, RAW’s mission involves reclaiming historical and cultural narratives from within, without awaiting validation from global institutions. She stresses the importance of redefining success in creative practice through context-specific criteria, rooted in social diversity, intergenerational transmission, and political awareness. Artistic agency, in this view, is inseparable from the capacity to inhabit and transform the narratives that define one’s cultural presence. Together, their contributions advocate for a decentered, relational, and context-based understanding of artistic agency. Rather than seeking validation through inclusion in dominant global circuits, they emphasize endogenous creativity, translocal solidarities, and the building of alternative infrastructures of knowledge. This redefinition of artistic success destabilizes the urban-centric mythologies of cultural innovation and positions decentralized geographies as sites of critical experimentation and epistemic rupture.
Curating by Delphine M . M . Buysse
Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams
RAW Material Company @ La Casa Encendida ES, 2024
Casa Encendida / RAW Material Company
- Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams
Dur... more Casa Encendida / RAW Material Company
- Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams
During the whole year 2024, La Casa Encendida offers RAW Material Company a carta blanca in the ROOM A. Entitled, Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams, this project will unfold in three parts:
March 09th - June 02nd: May our song be worthy of those who listen, a reading room by Untitled duo’s (Yvon Langué & Soukaina Aboulaoula)
June 13th - September 22nd: An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea, a production residency followed by a solo exhibition with Renée Akitelek Mboya
September 19th - December 08th: Journeying, Containment, Carrying, Group Show curated by Amina Lawal Agoro
Catalog, 2022
Through the various editions of its Afropixel digital art festival, Kër Thiossane has been pursui... more Through the various editions of its Afropixel digital art festival, Kër Thiossane has been pursuing an open reflection on the commons, starting in Senegal, since 2012. For this new edition, at a time when climate change is becoming a matter of course everywhere, and when the concept of the capitalocene is taking over from that of the anthropocene, we are focusing our programming on the effects of anthropogenic activities on the planet, in particular the ocean.
In line with the actions that Kër Thiossane carries out throughout the year, we propose multidisciplinary works, accessible to all, and take advantage of the high point of the Dak'Art Biennial, to share our work sites and reinforce the ecological awareness that has been taking root in recent years within Senegalese civil society.
Through the digital arts, we aim to invite visitors, the people of Dakar, and also public authorities, to see, hear and touch the ecological emergency, and grasp the essential nature of the ocean, for the people and the future of Senegal.
Immersive artworks, a meeting between artists, researchers and marine professionals, mediation activities, workshops, concerts and performances... to make art lovers, the general public and institutions aware of the ecological changes underway and the challenges to be met.
A Ker Thiossane project, in collaboration with AFRIKIKK (Kër Thiossane, KIKK Festival and Alt Del) and Yann Philippe Tastevin (CNRS/UCAD).
With the support of Wallonie-Bruxelles International, Délégation générale Wallonie-Bruxelles Sénégal, Communauté française de Belgique, Région wallonne, Ville de Dakar - Dakar Ville Créative de l'UNESCO, Institut Français du Sénégal à Dakar, IRD, Fabrimétal, To:ORG, Espace Trames, Oceanium de Dakar, Arts Collaboratory.
Member of Partcours - Dak'Art, La Biennale de Dakar IN & OFF.
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Conference Presentations by Delphine M . M . Buysse
THÈME : Le corps comme objet de discours et de pratiques
- Other Forms of Solidarity: From Diplomacy to Armed Struggle
Papers by Delphine M . M . Buysse
Delphine Buysse explores how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with artistic creation in Africa, emphasizing both critical engagement and structural inequalities. Focusing on the 2021 Afropixel Festival in Dakar, she highlights how artists and cultural actors used exhibitions, workshops, and conferences to confront algorithmic biases and address the global asymmetries embedded in AI technologies—often dominated by Western corporate and epistemic frameworks. Buysse critiques the cultural appropriation of African visual heritage, particularly through the example of the French collective Obvious, whose AI-generated African masks raise unresolved questions around authorship, power, and exploitation. She underscores how cognitive and racial biases in AI systems, as well as exploitative labor practices in the Global South, reinforce existing hierarchies. The article also sheds light on African-led initiatives such as Masakhane and Deep Learning Indaba, which aim to decolonize AI by fostering research in African languages and local contexts. Ultimately, Buysse argues for a critical and situated use of AI in the arts—one that acknowledges its political, ethical, and cultural dimensions, and centers African agency in shaping technological futures.
- Emmanuel Tussore
In this critical text, Delphine Buysse analyzes Emmanuel Tussore's Unreclaimed as a visual meditation on traumatic memory, absent bodies and the ruins of the contemporary world. The installation, conceived in situ in the remains of the Maginot Building in Dakar, places the question of loss and the unrecovered at the heart of a reflection on systemic violence - colonial, ecological and migratory. Here, Tussore continues the work he began several years ago, combining an aesthetic of materials (rubble, cement bags, dust) with a poetics of absence. Through a series of intuitive gestures, the artist exhumes “gisants”, petrified figures of unclaimed victims, while evoking collective narratives of disaster and survival. The text also traces the key stages of Tussore's relationship with Dakar, including Sirènes (2016), Study for a Soap (2018), De Cruce (2022) and Birdhouse (2023), works in which the question of the body - displaced, engulfed, erased - is a constant. The Unreclaimed project reactivates these motifs in a highly symbolic location: the Maginot building, a colonial edifice commissioned by Crédit Foncier in the 1950s and now abandoned. Buysse sees it as a repository of intersecting memories, a place of mourning, contemplation and critique. At the crossroads of visual archaeology, funerary rite and political gesture, the installation embodies an attempt at symbolic reparation, in an aesthetic that blends the brutality of the material with the subtlety of the narrative. The author underscores the work's evocative power, between apocalyptic installation and homage to the invisible, sacrificed or forgotten dead, and places Tussore's approach within a genealogy that blends spirituality, materiality and postcolonial commitment.
Rountable by Delphine M . M . Buysse
- Inde-Indochine-Afrique : Migrations Et Diasporas Asiatiques
Curating by Delphine M . M . Buysse
- Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams
During the whole year 2024, La Casa Encendida offers RAW Material Company a carta blanca in the ROOM A. Entitled, Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams, this project will unfold in three parts:
March 09th - June 02nd: May our song be worthy of those who listen, a reading room by Untitled duo’s (Yvon Langué & Soukaina Aboulaoula)
June 13th - September 22nd: An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea, a production residency followed by a solo exhibition with Renée Akitelek Mboya
September 19th - December 08th: Journeying, Containment, Carrying, Group Show curated by Amina Lawal Agoro
In line with the actions that Kër Thiossane carries out throughout the year, we propose multidisciplinary works, accessible to all, and take advantage of the high point of the Dak'Art Biennial, to share our work sites and reinforce the ecological awareness that has been taking root in recent years within Senegalese civil society.
Through the digital arts, we aim to invite visitors, the people of Dakar, and also public authorities, to see, hear and touch the ecological emergency, and grasp the essential nature of the ocean, for the people and the future of Senegal.
Immersive artworks, a meeting between artists, researchers and marine professionals, mediation activities, workshops, concerts and performances... to make art lovers, the general public and institutions aware of the ecological changes underway and the challenges to be met.
A Ker Thiossane project, in collaboration with AFRIKIKK (Kër Thiossane, KIKK Festival and Alt Del) and Yann Philippe Tastevin (CNRS/UCAD).
With the support of Wallonie-Bruxelles International, Délégation générale Wallonie-Bruxelles Sénégal, Communauté française de Belgique, Région wallonne, Ville de Dakar - Dakar Ville Créative de l'UNESCO, Institut Français du Sénégal à Dakar, IRD, Fabrimétal, To:ORG, Espace Trames, Oceanium de Dakar, Arts Collaboratory.
Member of Partcours - Dak'Art, La Biennale de Dakar IN & OFF.