As North Korea goes to war or straight to hell, some might forget that in April this year, a fantastic monument was perpetrated upon an unwitting public in Dakar. And lil' ol' Kim had a hand in it.
Salient facts:
Cost: $27 million
Provenance: Concept and design by President Abdoulaye Wade
Execution: North Korea
Ownership: Wade would like 35% of all ticket sales since it's his Intellectual Property after all
I have no idea how one would do anything with this retrospectively, but it seemed too good and too topical not to bring up in these trying times for family businesses.
Here's Wikipedia on the African Renaissance Monument; and this is the BBC (Jesse Jackson was there).
hmmmm... his intellectual Property?
ReplyDeletespot the similarity on offical webpage of The Democratic People's Republic of Korea - http://www.korea-dpr.com/users/thai/April2008.htm
(photo no 28)
but maybe North Koreans dont have inetllectual property rights..
how to take it to 2008?
well the construction of the statue began 3 April 2008... so one could look at the designs / in-tension - the birth of a monument, a speculative take
ReplyDeleteSo many weird things about this - Ngone Fall had great gossip on it, about Wade's daughter managing the project - this is what the daughters do - and some weird link to the Dak'art etc. I didn't even know Kim had friends in Senegal! Also, Wade seems generally touchy about copyrights: remember his spat with Mbeki over the "African Renaissance" concept (i kid you not they called it concept)? Might be why the construction plans images insist: a concept by A. Wade...weird
ReplyDeletevaguely relating to this and also more to our "china in africa" just noticed that a paper on "Entangled Knowledges: Exporting Chinese Architecture to the Third World" by Duanfang Lu (University of Sydney) was just presented at the in the symposium "South of East West: Post-Colonial Planning, Global Technology Transfer, and the Cold War" Berlage Institute Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 9-10 November 2010. the longer/ bigger history of china in africa?
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