Senegal
Impressions from Dakar

From November 15 to 19, 2021, a total of 11 participants successfully participated in the AFRICOMICS workshop at the premises of the École Nationale des Arts de Dakar. The workshop was led by a team of German comic artist Mikaël Ross and Senegalese press artist Omar Diakité, called Odia. After the workshop, the participants decided to organize a regulars' table at the École Nationale des Arts in the future to network young cartoonists.

The workshop facilitators

© Omar Diakite Omar Diakité was born in Dakar in 1964. He holds a degree in graphic communication from the National School of Fine Arts in Dakar. He is a press artist, caricaturist, illustrator, graphic designer and lecturer at the École des arts Dakar. He currently works as a journalist and cartoonist for the daily newspaper "Tribune" and as a satirist for the magazine "Le P'tit Railleur". He is also co-author of the comic strip "Afrique en partage" and the comic strip "les histoires de Nafi et Khadija: Droits pour tous". He created an exhibition of cartoons at the Musée des femmes Henriette Bathilyzum on the theme of  "Women in public space" and created graphics for national and international organizations. He has participated in numerous comic and press drawing festivals in Africa and Europe. He is married and has 5 children.
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  © Darjush Davar An avid comic reader and cartoonist from an early age, Mikaël Ross only came to the Ninth Art in a roundabout way. Born in Munich in 1984, he initially trained as a theater cutter at the Bavarian State Opera. Moving to Berlin and studying at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee influenced his first longer story "Herrengedeck," which he self-published in 2008. During a year abroad at the Brussels School of Bande Dessinée, ESA Saint-Luc in Brussels, he meets the Belgian scenarist and draftsman Nicolas Wouters. They shared a fascination for punk and subculture. Together, the two wrote and drew the graphic novel "Les pieds dans le béton" (2013), which immerses its two restless protagonists in the Berlin squatter scene of the eighties. The book was published in 2014 under the title "Lauter Leben!" by Avant-Verlag. After two years of research in Neuerkerode, the cartoonist dares a change of perspective with his graphic novel "Der Umfall" (2018), and tells from Noel's point of view about the lows and highs of a young man with an intellectual disability. For this he received the Max & Moritz Award for the "Best German-language Comic" in 2020.

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