Marième Mboup (@sheyumboe ) is a born and raised Senegalese textile researcher, artist and designer. She studies and explores what lies at the intersection of cloth, art and cultural heritage via multiple mediums such as fibres, material practices, fashion design and visual storytelling. For the April edition of GIDA Library, Mboup shows us the references that shape her practice.
“With every fibre Of My Being” by Raw Material Company, explores the work and history of multidisciplinary artists Zohra Opoku and Tadiwa Madenga’s “The Garden Letters of Yvonne Vera.” Marième’s thoughts are positioned through personal belonging and identity with historical, cultural and socio-economic influences. They also highlight the importance of the spaces and environments that shape us as individuals.
Sanlé Sory’s passion and focus in “Je vais décoller” (1977) are important in reminding her of the crucial role of photographers in the preservation of African fashion and arts.
To Marième, there is an unwavering focus on creating intentional art and spaces that connect individuals. It allows one to feel at peace through the expression of ideas and emotions, shaped by personal style and artistic practice.
Head to the link in our bio for the full newsletter!
Can you slow down and still be seen in a world that rewards speed?
That’s the question Marième Mboup, aka Yumboë, is answering through her work.
Born in Dakar, now creating in Montreal, Marième is a stylist, textile artist, and visual storyteller whose work resists fast fashion and reclaims fashion as cultural memory, community, and care. Her approach is rooted in Senegalese heritage, shaped by diasporic experience, and powered by deep intention.
In this conversation, she shares why she refuses to create just for content, what it means to build creative community as an immigrant, how she honours cultural heritage through draping and design and how she slowed down to reconnect
If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to lead with heart, Marième is showing the way.
🧡 Read the full interview now with the link in bio
#MarmaladeCollective #AfricanCreatives #DiasporaVoices #SlowFashion #SenegaleseStyle #TextileArt
'SAMA SEERU ĀDUNA' — Cloth as an archival tool for storytelling and preservation.
Textiles have what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has called a "social life".
Their "commoditization lies at the complex intersection of temporal, cultural, and social factors." But they also have a "cultural biography", as they "move through different hands, contexts and uses, thus accumulating a specific biography, or set of biographies."
— With Every Fiber Of (my) Being, Zohra Opoku, Raw Material Company
Here represented, Seeru Njägo/Seeru Rabal, a Senegalese woven loincloth that follows the human being from birth to death. Used in many traditional ceremonies — births, marriages, funerals.
Through every of its strings, it travels across stories as a way of preserving them — this cloth carries the family history of the people who manipulate and cover themselves of it and carries a deep meaning into its use; it travels physical spaces while holding emotions and ascends to spiritual ones while leaving a trace of itself into one's spirit.
Via the complexity of the shapes in this installation, my intention is to embody the intricate relationship between cloth and identity — the different meanings behind the cloth we wear and how it directly relates to us as people. Its political, social and spiritual meanings within our communities, and the ways that we honour those textiles while honouring the history behind their making and how it directly ties to vital elements that honour the environment, the body and the soul; asserting the sustainable base of African fashions and arts. As well as the importance of the stories of the people who harvested them, hand-dyed them and hand-weaved them into their final form and do the work of passing down those ancestral practices and techniques.
