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Exhibition|Tombouctou is a Woman's Name
Timbuktu is a Woman's Name is the title of the exhibition to be held in Casa África's galleries from 6 February to 2 May 2025.
It is dedicated to the resilience and beauty of the women of a city as mysterious as it is legendary, whose fame has always attracted many travellers and in which an interesting Andalusian legacy still survives.
The Spanish artist Irene López de Castro has spent more than thirty years as a cultural bridge between Spain and the Sahel. Since her first trip to Mali in 1989, she has maintained a deep connection with this country, reflected in her pictorial work, characterised by a figurative and dreamlike language. Among his most outstanding exhibitions are those held in Italy over a period of twenty years and those dedicated to the women of Mali.
The main part of this exhibition brings together in Casa África's Guinea Room a selection of canvases by the author on the women of the Sahel, some of which have been exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts in Cordoba, Casa Árabe in Madrid, the Reial Cercle Artistic in Barcelona and the Sala Dalí of the Cervantes Institute in Rome.
The Kilimanjaro Room revolves around the ‘dream of Timbuktu’ (the theme of Irene's recent exhibition at the Palacio de los Condes de Gabia in Granada), which addresses the city's fascination as a travelling mecca that has brought Spain and Mali together in a shared cultural bond, such as the legacy of Sudanese architecture, which began with the great Djingareyber mosque, the work of the Granada-born Es Saheli, commissioned by the great Malian emperor Kankou Moussa, whose 700th anniversary of construction is being commemorated in 2025.
By touring the exhibition Timbuktu is a Woman's Name, visitors can travel through the works and feel part of the African beauty that inspired them, through the drawings and paintings, the different texts and fragments of his autobiographical book Memories of the River Niger, the dream of Timbuktu, whose French version (Le rêve de Timbuktu, Mémoires du fleuve Niger, translated by Joëlle Guatelli Tedeschi), has just been presented at the Musée national du Mali by the Spanish embassy in Mali.
The audiovisual content in the Sala Guinea shows part of her notebooks from Mali, her exhibition Au coeur du Mali organised by the Spanish embassy at the Musée national du Mali in Bamako in 2017 and highlights the project carried out by the women of Timbuktu of the Association Gouna Tière, an environmental initiative to recycle plastic, awarded the 1st Women's Earth 2022 Prize by the Yves Rocher Foundation. In the Kilimanjaro Room, a video shows the awarding of the PRIX ES SAHELI 2024 (prize for the preservation of Sudanese architecture) and gives the floor to the women of Timbuktu, through Haoua Touré and Fatouma Harber.