VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
Invisible giants
ARTIST: Élise Fitte-Duval
PRESENTED BY: AFRICANS RISING
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH Heinrich Böll Stiftung
May attention at last be paid to these Humaines who know how to tame almost anything.
Let light be shed on these Jambars of a special kind, who have remained invisible to our eyes for too long. To these women. Quite simply.
In an ideal world, they wouldn’t need more than a tenth, if not a hundredth, to shine with their resounding achievements.
But in today’s world, against the odds, through the ignominy of war and weapons, precariousness and pain, they have had to generate more than sons and daughters for our nation, but also dreams, if not build edifices from scratch.
Invisible indeed, but immeasurable in their dignity, courage, humanism, faith
resilience, self-sacrifice… in short, all the things they needed in tons and hundreds of times over to accomplish the gigantic things they made possible and real, despite everything they lacked.
We had to make them timeless, but above all existing, now visible and therefore
never again translucent against the nothingness and occasional forgetfulness of our memories, one and all.
They tell their stories with modesty, but also with pride. They delivered with ease these parts of their multiple stories of plural life that embarrassment will surely have made them veil.
Born in Martinique, Élise Fitte-Duval has lived and worked in Senegal for the past twenty years. She graduated from the École d’Arts Plastiques de la Martinique (DNAP, 1986) and from the École Nationale Supérieure de Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 1996, specializing in photography. She pursues a narrative form of photographic research. She was awarded the Casa Africa prize for a woman photographer at the Rencontres Photographiques de Bamako 2011. Until 2018, Élise Fitte-Duval was editorial photographer at Panapress, a pan-African news agency based in Dakar.
All works are reproduced with the kind permission of the artist and are licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.
This project is co-financed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the NGO Africans Rising.
