Dakar Modern
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbSVS0AmtA]
I’ve been wanting to post for a while now about the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion. Primarily the work of the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris; remember Harris film, “The Twelve Apostles of Nelson Mandela,” about his South African step father. The DDFR is described as an “interactive, multimedia project,” where New Yorkers–mostly Africans and African-Americans–showing Harris their family photos and photo albums and then telling the stories behind the photographs. Great project. In the video above, from the project, Pierre Thiam, chef and co-owner of the Senegalese restaurant Le Grand Dakar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, not far from my house, gives Harris a look at a newly independent Senegal of the 1960s and 1970s.
