Bargny (SEN)
( 2018 - 2021 / ongoing project)
Located 35 kilometers from Senegalese capital Dakar, the town of Bargny is becoming the capital's new large industrial suburb. Caught between the consequences of rising water levels linked to climate change and its forced shift towards the industrial sector, it looks like a vast construction site of dying worlds that are. A community of Lebu fishermen and Fulani breeders, owners of their family compounds inherited from generation to generation, the populations are gradually being dispossessed of all resources and made dependent on the industries settling in the region. Among the projects defined in the area are a coal-fired power plant, a mineral and bulk port and soon a steel industry. All these infrastructures will only reinforce the climate and environmental problems: air pollution and increasing CO₂ emissions (greenhouse gases), destruction of marine and terrestrial ecosystems, land and water resource grabbing. While families located along the coast lose their homes every year as the sea rise, without obtaining any solution for re-housing, the State decrees their land of public utility in order to hand it over to the promoters of industrial projects.
As if sitting on the edge of the world, Bargny questions our society and its choices, an echo of the ecological disasters in progress, witnessing a forced march for the "emergence" of Senegal .
With Laurence Grun, journalist
Project "Bargny, ici commence l'émergence" was codirected with Laurence Grun