Part I, Untitled, from the series Bolol, 2019. © Eva Diallo

Bolol

This ongoing photographic series is divided into chapters and focuses on Eva Diallo’s family members' migration stories and trajectories, moving from Senegal to Italy. Following her cousins’ footsteps and in keeping with their testimonies, Diallo traveled across the North of Senegal, Mali, Bamako, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria and will soon continue her project to Libya and Italy. Instead of a straight documentary narrative, her photographs offer glimpses of the land and people she encountered along the way, tentatively capturing what might have passed before her cousins’ eyes, whose physical absence from the pictures makes their presence even more poignant. Poetic and lyrical, the pictures stress Diallo’s emotional language and relationship with the places she visited, her privileged position as a Swiss national allowed to travel freely, and her cousins’ sacrifices, dreams, hopes and disillusions for a better life in Europe.

Part I, Untitled, from the series Bolol, 2019. © Eva Diallo

About Eva Diallo

Eva Diallo (b. 1996) is a Swiss-Senegalese photographer. She graduated in 2018 from the Applied Arts of Vevey (training in photography). She currently resides in St-Louis, Senegal where she divides her time between the production of her personal projects and journalistic mandates. Her work is oriented on topical issues and family narratives, more particularly on migration from Africa to Europe.