“Nèg” means house. “Niah” means grass. “Nèguu niah”, therefore, literally means “house of grass”.
Life changes as the times change. The village on the coast of Senegal where Djibril lived has become a city with very different architecture from when he was a child. For economic and environmental reasons, most of the houses are now made of cement. The streets, which were nothing but sand, are now paved.
When the city was really a village, all the houses were made with dry grass. Every year as the season changed and new crops came in, neighbors helped each other take down the “old” grass and each house was made fresh and new.

(Hut), 2000, 15” x 21”, Woodburning