Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores archival photographs and plans of Dakar as (incomplete) mediators, allowing to grasp the historical urban landscape of Dakar. Focusing on cement, they are a visual entry point to understanding cementification as a sedimented process participating in shaping the city.

Paper long abstract:

When entering Dakar for the first time, the color grey catches the eye: under construction or unfinished buildings, cement bricks on the pavements, dust in the air. What does this color tell about the city? Dakar appears as the result of concrete historical sedimentations to be found in the urban palimpsest. Photographs and plans of Dakar, from the colonial period to nowadays, illustrate the prominent role of cement in the urban landscape, sometimes hidden behind white facades, glass or tiles. Sediments are always partial, and this contribution is a tentative reflection on my yet unfinished archival research. What are these photographs sharing about the historical materiality of the city? How did the social and historical life of cement contribute to shaping the city? Working with photographs aims to open new spaces to let the non-humans speak and retrace the cultural biography of cement in Dakar from the colonial city to the modern and changing post-colonial city. Photographs are fragments of the world providing a more intimate and visual understanding of urban development and transformations, considering that these archival photographs (and plans) contain information and views that help understand the evolving city and its cementification, here understood as a historical and forward-looking process. The presentation will also discuss the limits of these archival sources and their incompleteness as already framed and finished visuals. What are they missing? Materiality is relational, moving, and processual. Archival photographs might only be an entry point to understanding cementification as a sedimented and relational process.