Superfish carries out collective art research with traditional fishing as a focal point in phase with the recent and historic paths of black communities: in Senegal, France and Colombia with Afro-descendant communities.

For artists, this means instigating a collaborative platform of meetings between fishermen, artists’ collectives and traditional fishing specialists in order to produce exhibitions, publications and performances by opening the creative process to others, artists and inhabitants: fishermen and fishing families, dugout canoe captains and fishing cooperatives, fishmongers, fishing net repairers, surfers, shipwrights, religious teachers, traffickers.

The first area Superfish focussed its research on is Yoff in the suburbs of Dakar in Senegal, which the artists have visited several times since 2018. In summer 2018, they hosted a fisherman from Senegal in Brittany, Mar Gningue, who had the opportunity to meet those working in the fishing sector, terre-neuvas, mussel farmers from Bay of Mont-Saint Michel, fishermen... Mar Gningue was able to take a precise look at our societies. Many interviews were conducted and the exchanges were able to support what the work intended to achieve for both sides, in both Europe and Africa.

Winner of a call for projects by the French embassy in Bogota, in 2019 Superfish continued its research in the Afro-descendant black community of a fishermen’s village in the Pacific from the region of Chocó in Colombia – a black community from West Africa. Continuing their research in Colombia after Senegal immediately allowed the artists to create a collage of the history of slavery, cultural and ancestral resurgences, from one continent to another.

Due to the public health crisissituation related to Covid-19, the exhibition within the framework of the Dakar biennial, the posters and performances in June in Yoff, Senegal, and July 2020 in Jurubidà in the Choco department, and at the Alliance française of Medellín in Colombia have been postponed. With borders closed and exhibitions moved, in Lillemer, Brittany, Superfish has started making a dugout canoe, the main boat used by seafaring people around the world. It will be open to artists’ contributions, Guillaume Pinard will look to create a magic painting, Babeth Rambault has imagined a hiding place, and other invitations have been made.

In the continuity a publication will then document the first in-situ artistic gestures, research, discussions. It will be presented at the Frac Brittany in 2021.