In an effort to combat programmed obsolescence and the growing environmental crisis, The artist Jah Gal Dously transforms waste into art-fashionusing objects recovered from Dakar’s dumps. His work not only challenges the culture of excessive consumption, but also becomes a social criticism of the destruction of natureinviting reflection on the impact of our decisions on the planet.
From Dakar to Buenos Aires
Like many others, Senegal is one of the countries of Africa that houses in its capital, Dakar, one of the world’s largest dumps. There all those textile, electronic and plastic waste that the richest nations of the globe no longer want in their territory will stop. With the complicity of the rulers on duty, they are sent camouflaged as donations to help the poor, but the reality is that they do not need any of what they send them. Meanwhile, they see how their land, their water and their air contaminate without stopping.
The accumulation of waste is such that the collection trucks throw the garbage into the maA, causing the beaches to be filled with garments made with synthetic materials.
In that environment lives Sy Abdoul, better known as Jah Gal Dously, the multidisciplinary artist, designer, performer and environmentalist who came to Buenos Aires to give the talk “artistic practice between the design of clothing and the environmental gaze”, within the framework of the 2025 edition of Bienalsurthe Biennial of Contemporary Art that combines exhibitions and debates starring prestigious artists and figures of criticism.
-What does that medium impact on your current work?
– My work is a fight against waste and programmed obsolescence, which is that design strategy by which electronic products become obsolete ahead of time, which forces to buy new ones permanently. To this end, all my work, because of that my creations are treated, It is a social criticism of one of the most pressing problems in today’s world: the destruction of nature. That is why they are made from objects recovered from Dakar’s dumps.
The art of sewing
Dously inherited her taste for her mother’s fashiona dressmaker who made clothes on request. To see her sewing she learned the art of sewing and at the same time she was already working in different workshops where she was tailoring and all kinds of clothing for men, women and children.
Until he stopped doing commercial fashion and became an artist to raise awareness about environmental.
Always self -taught, it began to stand out in the preparation of changing rooms for various cultural events in the field of cinema, theater, music, fashion and photography.
With the big brands
Abdoul Sy made attire connected to solar panels to educate about the importance of clean energy; The Samsung company convened it to make sculptures with electronic waste about the Galaxy S7 cell phone launch; Orange, a multinational telecommunications company, summoned it to design a series of futuristic costumes; and It was even hired as a dressing room for the launch of C300, a new car model of the Mercedes Benz luxury brand.
And as if all that were not enough, andn 2024 was signed by Chanel to intervene in 19mnothing less than his new trades and exhibition workshop located in Porte d’Aubervilliers, in Paris.
For the occasion, he designed giant curtains made with molten plastics that covered all the construction, nothing less than a triangular building of 25,000 square meters built by the prestigious French architect Rudy Ricciotti.
Abdoul Sy reveals that when he received the proposal of that fashionable house, he resisted it, since the firm is part of a highly polluting industry. But after much thinking he knew that it was an opportunity that would give him a lot of place and impact to his complaint. “Today the discussion of doing ecological things is very much in vogue, but The truth is that the sustainable proposals only access an elite that can pay them. What reaches the general public or what has accessible prices is highly polluting. The idea is to look good with a certain social class, ”says this artist who took more than 20 hours to reach our country due to the combinations of plane he had to make.
Luxury recycled
In parallel to these collaborations, I believe his own brand, “Jahgal”, which is based on the concept of “nothing is lost, everything is transformed”. It is an area where it exhibits garments that elaborates through the recovery of tissues and the transformation of objects.
Far from being a commercial commitment, it is a space of creativity where its designs transcend in several ways: as an ode to preparation and innovation in the use of unconventional materials; and as a social criticism of the current situation: consumerism, alienation and destruction of nature.
“I would like to work with African noble materials, such as cotton or raffia, but globalization, which is a big problem, prevents it. It happens that Senegal is a great cotton producer but everything that is harvested is exported since it is a commoditie that leaves a lot Sacos, pants and dresses, but I always seek to cross between genre noble and artificial. “
The future
Questioned about the future of fashion, the designer exposes skeptic: “I see it complicated since this industry is part of a vicious circle that discarded every year what has ceased to be a trend. I am aware that there is no going back, that the past and the contaminated is already, and that it is a difficult gear to reverse. It is up to the creators to denounce pollution. The interesting thing about Bienalsur’s proposal is that it helps artists to arrive in their debates to a different audience. Art is in museums but now more than ever you have to take it to the streets so that people can see the impact of the things it consumes. ”
In tune, He joined the photographer Fabrice Monteiro and the non -profit organization Ecofund to give life to “the prophecy”, a Series of photographs that visually show the urgent ecological problems of Senegal and are exhibited in Picture New York Until September 16, as part of the Pix Pictet exhibition.
Monteiro is one of the finalist photographers of the award. Born in Belgium, he grew up in Berlin and currently lives in Dakar, where this series began in 2013.
Anchored in ten different places in Senegal, the images expose figures that interact with the sinister polluted landscape and transmit a strong message about the destruction of the environment.
The photos look the attire of Dously, which were meticulously made with wrappers, packages, plastic containers, networks, all kinds of cables and rubble found there. They operate as visual warnings: act now or witness the devastation of the planet. “The idea was to reflect the atmosphere and the state in which each destination is found,” he says.
In one, for example, a woman dressed as a tree is seen, in the center of a forest fire, holding foliage in the air to protect him from the flames. In another, a creature with horns and white face holds a wand on a mountain of technological waste, where children burn cables to extract metals while inhaling toxic smoke.
“It happens that every year we suffer fires caused by man. More than 700,000 hectares of forests and pastures have already been destroyed,” concludes Abdoul Sy.