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Presentation of “Memories of the Niger River”
March 10, 20226:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
6:00 p.m.
Free entry until the room’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.
Artist Irene López de Castro will be presenting her book in Madrid on Thursday, March 10, at an event organized by Casa Árabe and Casa África as part of Women’s Week. Women’s Week.
Can a trip transform your life forever? Is it possible to feel a strange and powerful connection to a place thousands of miles away from your home? Who exactly guides us so that we coincide at the right time and place? In 1989, Irene, a young Fine Arts student, got an unexpected opportunity: to travel to Mali and walk along the course of the Niger River. With no prior points of reference, she embarked on this adventure by following the echoes of a name: Timbuktu.
Although the mythical city took a long time to reach, that first trip was the beginning of a revolution within her, a turning point in the author’s life and an endless source of creative inspiration for over thirty years. However, since the Jihadist invasion in 2012, Mali has been living a very different situation. Given the instability and violence, Memories of the Niger River has come to life as a way to share first-person memories of peace, beauty and love at the heart of the Sahel.
The presentation will be attended by the author, accompanied by Mariame Sy, Senegal’s ambassador to Spain, and Jesús Diez Alcalde, a university specialist in Communication in War Conflicts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Presented by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s International Relations Coordinator.
Irene López de Castro (Madrid, 1967) is a painter with a major international career. Her exhibitions have traveled to Paris, Biarritz, Madrid, Barcelona, Venice, Milan, Verona, Syracuse, Seoul, London, Bamako and Florence. In 2017, the National Museum of Mali hosted a large exhibition organized by the Spanish embassy in that country. Her work on the Sahel and the women of Timbuktu has also been displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Cordoba (2019), at the Reial Cercle Artistic in Barcelona (2020) and at Casa Árabe in Madrid (2021).
Mariame Sy has been the Ambassador of the Republic of Senegal in Spain since 2018. Before that, from 2015 to 2018, she was the Director for Africa and the African Union at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Senegalese Abroad. After graduating from Senegal’s National School of Administration in 2006, Ambassador Mariame Sy has also held the positions of Counselor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of her country. In addition, she was the national coordinator of the Global Focal Point Network for Women, Peace and Security from 2016 to 2018.
Jesús Díez Alcalde is a colonel in the Spanish Army. He is a graduate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Spain and the Army of Chile. He has been an analyst at the Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies and is currently a member of the National Security Department. He has been deployed on international missions in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Lebanon and Somalia. He holds a degree in Information Sciences (Journalism) from the University of La Laguna (Santa Cruz de Tenerife) and is a university specialist in Communication in War Conflicts, having graduated from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.