The exhibition Ré-imaginer le passé, curated by Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Isabel Raabe, Ibou C. Diop, and Malick Ndiaye, is on display at the KINDL — Centre for Contemporary Art until 28 July 2024. One of the artist prefensting his work is Uriel Orlow.

Uriel Orlow, a Swiss artist, grounds his work in interdisciplinary artistic research. In his work Soil Affinities, he examines the historical and contemporary ties between Senegal and France through the lens of agriculture. The work’s starting point is a 19th-century vegetable-growing area in the Parisian banlieue of Aubervilliers, which was closed down as European countries began establishing colonial agriculture in Africa. After the Berlin Conference (1884/85), which partitioned the African continent among European powers, the French Colonial Ministry established an experimental colonial garden in Paris. Plants were transported from the Americas to Paris and then to newly established test gardens in Dakar, Saint-Louis, and other West African locations in custom-made “Ward crates”. These gardens cultivated European staples like onions, tomatoes, peppers, and green beans to sustain the steadily growing French settler population. Following Senegal’s independence from France in 1960, the commercial cultivation of these vegetables in West Africa surged. Several European companies established industrial farms in Senegal primarily to supply Rungis, one of Europe’s biggest wholesale markets in Paris. Orlow’s installation uses nonlinear video images, photographs, and archival material to trace the relationships between plants and people across various geographies and time periods.

Soil Affinities (2021) contains of wooden boxes, videos, photographs, soil.