Paper short abstract:

Set setal was an urban movement which highlighted the complicated relationships between public art, public space, and the role of the artist in the face of a post-euphoric independent Senegal.

Paper long abstract:

In a limited-print monograph published at the start of the 1990s, ENDA Tiers Monde, a Dakar-based non-governmental organization posed an anxious question regarding the newly developing youth movement called set setal, asking if it were "the underlying expression of a new order?" This question expressed the uncertainty surrounding the development of the movement led by the disenfranchised youth of Dakar, whose reaction to the dire social, political and economic conditions of 1980s Dakar resulted in a nation-wide cleaning campaign and a cornucopia of murals and statues spreading messages of cleanliness and orderliness, then unprecedented in as public an arena as the city streets. Set setal was an urban movement which highlighted the complicated relationships between public art and space, individual rights to the city, the limits of official government, and of the role of the artist in the face of a post-euphoric independent Senegal. While it functioned to open up discourse on individual agency in public space, it was also a movement which reflected a 'will to power' which is often obfuscated in analyses of the beloved and well-memorialized movement.