Souleymane Bachir

The Sea within us echoes these memories by Ndeye Filly Gueye.
In Hier, j’ai dansé avec la mer, aujourd’hui aussi, Souleymane explores the ocean as a profound metaphor for memory. He uses it to help him convey memoirs of confessions, testimonies and interactions through his interest in evoking familiarity in scenery and subject.
The Ecocriticism2 concept englobes the cultivation of human culture in relation to the physical world: in the countryside, in the city, on shore or at sea. The sound of the waves rocks the core, cradles the souls and enters the deepest parts, as deep as the worlds at sea that will only be told through tales. A time travel to childhood, resurfacing that feeling of bliss, escape in the outdoor summers or customary visits. Once facing the sea, the mind will start to decomplex life nuances from what meets more than the eye, glazing beyond the horizon.
This one of the long standing connections between human life and the sea. A safe space filled with magical mysteries with each encounter. It could be the sand embracing the skin rubbing off the dead skin that once served. Each summoned body comes with a memoir and individuality. A stroll, a meditation, a shared moment with a companion. All with one commonality of a great escape as ways lead back to reality, eventually.
Here, the sea is not just water but a reflective surface for the emotions and memories that ripple beneath and delves into the ocean’s role as a collective archive of human experience. Through a visual blend of poetic storytelling and a carefully curated aesthetic, it offers a series that invites viewers to see the ocean as this collective space of memory and transformation. This work reaffirms his curation of the deep connections between identity, space, memory, and the human desire for renewal.
This series transcends simple portraiture, offering a curated narrative that invites viewers to see a selected color scheme of clothing in every frame, and creates a sense of vulnerability against the backdrop of the sea telling the stories we find familiar yet shared differently.
Synergies with Safi Niang to layer the composition with movement direction and stylism created a choreography of bodies uniting stories from her, Omar Pujo, Hortense Cynthia Brito Lima, Maboneza Mamert Junior, Joshua. Starting points for the series are scenes of Villa Noailles in conjunction with Île de Porquerolles chosen with the intention to establish a visual interplay between constructed history and natural continuity.

2 Lewis, Sharon A, and Ama S Wattley. Bodies of Water in African American Literature, Music, and Film. Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1 June 2023, pp. 5–8, African American Ecocriticism, www.cambridgescholars.com/resources/pdfs/978-1-5275-0210-9-sample.pdf. Accessed 10 Aug. 2024. Research scholar Nasrullah Mambrol cites William Rueckert as the first to coin the term “ecocriticism” in 1978, but notes that the study of ecocriticism came to prominence during the mid-1990s. Mambrol states: “(1) Ecocritics believe that human culture is related to the physical world. (2) Ecocriticism assumes that all life forms are interlinked. Ecocriticism expands the notion of “the world” to include the entire ecosphere.”