Cheick Diallo, an African master of design

Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow | Sabine Cessou Follow

A great African name in design, Cheick Diallo is present at all fairs and biennials. How did it come about? Thanks to a spirit as free as malicious, since childhood. This earned him some trouble, but also great success. Portrait.

Publicity

Born in 1960, Cheick Diallo is one of the first citizens of independent Mali. His mother is Senegalese-Malian and his father, Seydou Diallo, a Senegalese architect settled in Bamako at the time of French Sudan. He is known for having revisited the "Sudanese" style of the great mosque of Mopti, and made "neo-Sudanese" the architecture that still marks Bamako and the major cities of Mali.

“ At the French school in Bamako, I was the only black in my class. I was fighting every day because I didn't want to be the head of a Turk. Since I knew how to fight, that posed a problem ”. At the age of 7, he was judged so turbulent that his parents entrusted him to his uncle in Casamance, a teacher who had just been posted to this province in the south of Senegal. Too busy with his two classes, his uncle in turn entrusted him to a family of teachers from Marsassoum, a town located between Bignona and Sédhiou, on a tributary of the Casamance river.

A paradise that leaves an “ indelible ” mark on him , he says. He tinkers, makes his toys and enjoys an education that " got lost in the city ". With Wolof, Bambara and French, the values ​​of respect, taste for work and freedom represent the three feet of his interior stool, long before he started making furniture. “ I felt free, I was no longer the overprotected little city dweller. I was with peasants who did not forbid me to go and play in the bush or in the village. We spent our time fishing, hunting, gathering and wrestling. The traditional wrestling tournaments marked the end of the harvest. Villages challenged each other through their young boys. "

Only shadow point in this idyllic picture: " Nobody told me to go to school ... My mother was not fooled, she realized that I was cheating on my report cards. When I came back to Bamako on vacation, she checked my level . ”

" Intelligent but distracted student "

At the age of 12, repatriated to Bamako, he was enrolled in a public school where he stood out above all for his skills in wrestling during recess. He continues to hide his notebooks, go fishing and do as he pleases. The punishment falls: he will repeat with good fathers at the cathedral school, where rigor is required. He misses his certificate of study. Seeing himself caught up by his little sisters, with whom he does not want to meet in class, he has a first click. He begins to work, even if he draws and dreams during lessons. " Very intelligent, but distracted, " note his teachers on his report cards.

After a detour to Dakar, like many young Malians, because of strikes and sleepless years in high schools, he passed his Bac B at the French school in Bamako, where there were only ... three students in terminal . He is preparing to go to France. Independently, he decides not to join his friends in Reims. The reason ? What he hears them say about their way of life. " They slept from Monday to Sunday in nightclubs ! " He drops a pen on a map of France while aiming near Paris, and falls on Rouen. On site, he discovers that he is “ African, period ”, and meets the community of students from the continent. “ The notion of nationality was erased, I felt at ease, especially since I have always been a foreigner everywhere : the Senegalese in Mali, the Malian in Senegal. I adopted this idea so as not to suffer from it, and rather to make it a wealth ”.

First enrolled in Economics, he forks as soon as he discovers that Rouen is home to a school of architecture. He makes new friends, French people, enters families, discovers that " architecture is first and foremost curiosity ", and keeps the promise he made to his mother: he don't drink a drop of alcohol.

A stool with an overturned snow shovel

He became a “mercenary” of architectural agencies, to the point of being entrusted with an agency in Deauville, for three years. He discovers the terroir, redesigns farm buildings bought by the English, makes Michel Audiard evenings and trips to Africa with friends. In no hurry to return to Mali, where his father's notoriety forced him to make a name for himself, he continued his studies at the National School of Industrial Creation in Paris, the ENSCI-Les Ateliers.

His idea at the time guided his entire career: " reinventing the writing of modern and contemporary Africa ", to show it. His first success stems from diversion and not from an identity. He created a stool with an overturned snow shovel, whose shapes recall human buttocks. His idea is based on the observation that " the first stool is the heels ".

The rest is history. The object was noticed at the Interior Scenes show at the Porte de Versailles. He made a splash at the first African design fair, which was integrated into the Biennale des arts de Dakar in 1996. He presented three objects, including a sagaie lamp, which turns on and off when you hit it on the ground. With a dozen others, including his Dakar friend Nicolas Sawalo Cisse, he founded the Association of African Designers, of which he is the current president.

His journey then took him to Togo, to “coach” creators before the 1997 Ouagadougou International Crafts Fair (SIAO) in Burkina Faso. The Minister of Crafts and Trade of Mali is surprised to see him in this delegation and calls him for a program and an exhibition Made in Mali. He brings together many craftsmen to design products for export, including the ten who still work for him.

Called for a scenography at the Ciotat shipyard near Marseille, he set up his Diallo Design workshop in Rouen in 1997. This city remains its base, even if it still has a foothold in Mali. He became an international figure through workshops and design fairs, often commissioned by the French Institute, USAID and the Canadian agency Trade Facilitation Office (TFO). A big date for him: the traveling exhibition Africa Remix, in 2005, which offers for the first time an overview of contemporary creation.

Consultant, he won the Montreal Design Show in 2006 with a coffee table made of cotton weave hardened with resin. It ranges from the Saint-Etienne Biennale to the Milan Salon, including London, New York and Eindhoven Design Week in the Netherlands. There he met gallery owners, who are now four to present his work in New York, London, Cape Town and Bamako.

Detail of an installation at Segou Art, February 2020, on the "power virus". RFI / Sabine Cessou

What is African in design

It responds to private orders, both for furniture and architectural projects, and participates in contemporary art exhibitions. He signed the scenography of the last Bamako Photographic Meetings, and embodies the development of a design that he does not like to call "African". " What is African in the tieboudienne, the national dish of Senegal? Rice, which is eaten everywhere, sauce, vegetables, fish ... The tieb is Senegalese for the way it is made on site. But design belongs to everyone, it can only be African in its touch, a way of doing things and a special use. Among these uses, he cites the furniture presented in Brussels at Table Manners , for a "design on the ground" corresponding to the way of eating of the Senegalese, around a bowl on a mat on the ground.

In Dakar, he is known for his cutlery, inspired by Tuareg crafts in Mali. The part that best represents him appears on his business card. This red cotton armchair on a metal frame carries that famous "African touch", not ostentatious at home. “ When I returned to the country, I made a criticism of the furniture: a single armchair could fill an entire living room, as in Dubai. I proposed another lighter, airy, practical and colorful model, with shapes similar to the big coveted armchairs, inspired by the furniture of the poor, metal structures and woven fishing line. "

Today, his dream would be to create a training center, to formalize the academy which is already practiced at home. " Transmitting has become vital, " he says. He has not come to the end of the big mastoc chair, still king in West Africa, but he is aware of having " moved the cursor and done a job that is paying off ". Witness the success of Ousmane Mbaye in Senegal or Jean-Servais Somian in Ivory Coast. If a model had to be cited in Asia, he would speak of Vietnam, " a country which has succeeded in developing its crafts in design, like the Scandinavians, to produce better and in quantity ". Like his father, Cheick Diallo sees himself copied a lot, the ransom of a success of which the two men spoke. " We were very close and disagreed about everything," he recalls. There was a great rivalry between us, which helped me a lot. In the end, he called me "the boss". A joke… ”

Newsletter With the Daily Newsletter, find the headlines directly in your mailbox

Follow all international news by downloading the RFI application

• Senegal
• Culture
• Mali
• Culture Africa