Anna Binta Diallo: Predictions

Across successive bodies of collage works, Anna Binta Diallo has portrayed complex interconnections between human activity and the natural world. These series began with Wanderings, which analysed folk stories and the tales that structure a society’s perception of the world. Gathering visual material from scientific, literary, and historical sources, Diallo applied a diasporic and cross-cultural approach as she constructed various folkloric motifs and archetypes. Continuing from Wanderings, her Voyageur/Almanac works expanded into ecology, speculating on how different mythologies and folklores across cultures might inform our coexistence with various forms of life, and broaden environmental awareness.

Predictions, the newest iteration of this project, extends Diallo’s work into the study of forecasts – scientific and otherwise. With visual references to geology, earth science, mapping, weather events, and topography, the artist has researched data pertaining to astronomical cycles, calendars, tide tables, and farmer’s almanacs of the past and present. Her latest works ask: What was projected into the future by past peoples? What has come true? What hasn’t? What could?

Diallo envisions her own imaginative set of predictions, proposing infinite loops of imagery that can be re-interpreted multiple times, in different cycles. She integrates nonlinear and even nonverbal storytelling, suggesting both new and ancient notions of narrative formed by images in relation. Through layering flora, fauna, human connection to land, and the cosmos, Diallo imagines speculative paths that our ecological and cultural landscapes might follow, and the unexpected constellations of meaning that can guide us through uncertain times.