RAVINEVANDRING
23 & 26 September 2026
Meeting place: Tonsen Kirke
Oslo Arkitekturtriennale 2026
This territorial project questions the gap between the political ambitions of ‘transforming the Senegal River valley into the California of Senegal’ and the reality of a rural periphery that has become a major source of emigration.
Photograph by Thibault Félix, © Laboratory for Urban Boundaries
During my first stay in Dakar, I met Raphaël, a native of Tiguéré Ciré, a village of a thousand inhabitants located on the banks of the Senegal River. At his invitation, I visited the village in 2022 and 2023. Through fieldwork, interviews and unexpected encounters, I strive to document the evolution of a fertile valley that is disappearing in favour of a hyper-specialised farming system, which is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
More than thirty years after the dams were built, farming production remains low. Despite their agricultural vocation, river towns have become forgotten suburbs where the remaining populations subsist on livelihood agriculture financed by money transfers from the diaspora. In this Sahelian territory, exposed to the many consequences of climate change, migration has become a survival strategy encouraged by families.
Senegal River basin, waterscapes and infrastructures
The Senegal River Basin covers 300,000 km² across Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal.
The greater availability of irrigation water made possible by dams has led to a rise in the value of cultivated land, as well as to increased conflicts over the use of water resources.
These flows, both physical and virtual, are reshaping the social, spatial and economic organisation of the Senegal River valley. While many emigrants are unable to return to their territory of origin, the transformations resulting from their displacement are visible. Villages are becoming denser as money circulates. The diaspora has become the most reliable source of funding and the main actor of a deterritorialised urbanism.
These encounters, observations, interviews and photographs call for an agrarian transition towards a more sustainable mode of subsistence that takes into account the river's ecosystem services and ancestral agricultural practices that do not require irrigation systems. Such a perspective involves rethinking certain production systems and imagining new interactions between emigrants and those who remain in their homeland.
The connections I made in Dakar and then on the banks of the Senegal River led me to meet this immigrant diaspora in the Ile-de-France region, where I am continuing my photographic investigation.
Thibault