El Hadji Sy is an important figure in the critical movement that followed Lépold Sedar Senghor´s Négritude ideology. Senghor supported El Hadji’s work from the start and continued to follow it, but they came together again in another cultural policy initiative, inaugurated by Senghor: the famous Villages des Arts. The village is a co-operative for artists in Dakar where each one has a professional studio.
Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again.
Born in Senegal in 1954, El Hadji Sy (El Sy) studied fine arts at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar...
Michel Auder was born in 1945 in Soissons, France...