Plastic canisters of 20L are omnipresent in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. They largely stem from Malaysia and Indonesia and are imported via Gambia as palm oil canisters, before being re-used and re-modified in various ways by delta inhabitants. 

Petrol- and palm oil production are major drivers of fragmentation and intertwinement as well as of environmental ruination. Their offsprings, the canisters, are products and residues of the Plantationocene (Haraway 2016). They represent, take part in and materially inherit processes of extraction and dispossession in different world regions and relate various human and more-than-human actors to each other across space and time. As tangible and quotidian, yet always malleable objects, they can guide our quest to inquire, critique and contest such processes and relate them to each other. Moreover, canisters offer themselves as objects that can directly and sensuously convey these processes and relations into the exhibitive realm.

In “Bidonmondes”, the canisters’ history is brought into correspondence with the their various applications in the delta after the palm oil is consumed – their use as canisters for palm oil, water and petrol and their re-modification into dustbins, sieves, and burning material. The different material and symbolic makings and re-makings of palm oil and petrol are thereby explored across six ‘bumpy’ audio-visual loops, which reconfigure, enlarge and contrast imagery and sound: on the one hand, the imagery and sound around canisters in the Sine-Saloum Delta. On the other hand, the canisters’ inherited sound: Malaysian logging, palm oil cutting, palm oil industry advertisement, petrol industry advertisement for offshore drilling near the delta, motor boat use, and petrol production. The videoloops’ individual arrhythmicity and possible sequencing into one imperfect, endless cycle thereby also point towards the unfulfilling human desire for infinite (re)production within a finite world.

Not only the work itself explores the tension between ruination and agency, also its naming makes this reference. “Bidonmondes” draws onto the term “Bidonville”, a term coined in colonialised Morocco and Tunisia in the early 1930s for housing at the edges of cities made from left-over tin oil canisters. A Francophone attribution, it initially travelled via postcards, hence relied on a visualisation, before becoming a standalone term used across the francophone world to delineate the creators and inhabitants of such places as the other, impure and dispossessed, living a peripheral life. In another perspective, however, the creators and inhabitants of so called “Bidonvilles” also ascribed new value to the residues of extractivism and reappropriated-, made a home- and created a community amidst them.

Nowadays, peripheries and centres are fragmented, precarities intertwine and nature-culture divides collapse. Distinct but at the same time interdependent, emergent worlds constitute. It is in this context, that I come to use the term “Bidonmondes” as a globalised and indeed charged offspring of “Bidonville”. In the centre stands thereby not anymore an object made of tin initially containing petrol, but one made of petrol initially containing palm oil. “Bidonmondes” – by taking up the term “Bidonville”, but also by paying homage to the oeuvre of Romuald Hazoumé – shall thus connect the agentive ways of living with/in residues in colonialised Marocco and Tunisia and postcolonial Senegal and highlight both the continuities of extractivism and its acceleration and globalisation.