Ladji Diaby reimagines collapse, care, and collective futures at Lafayette Anticipations.
9 April 2026
At Lafayette Anticipations, Ladji Diaby’s ‘Who’s gonna save the world?’ unfolds as both provocation and proposition, an exhibition that refuses the comfort of singular answers. Instead, the Franco-Malian artist assembles a charged constellation of found furniture and discarded objects, reworked into sculptural installations that blur the boundaries between the intimate and the political.
Drawing on a deeply personal archive, Diaby transforms second-hand furnishings into gestures reminiscent of his mother’s domestic rituals, in which ornamentation became a conduit for spirituality and protection. These objects, once marginal, are elevated into vitrines of memory and belief, their previous lives lingering in quiet collaboration with the artist.
Installed within the institutional frame, the works interrogate how value is assigned, and by whom. What was once negligible accrues symbolic weight, exposing the hierarchies that structure Western systems of cultural legitimacy. In Diaby’s hands, the discarded becomes talismanic, a site where political, spiritual, and aesthetic aspirations converge.
The exhibition’s title operates rhetorically. For Diaby, the world’s salvation is neither imminent nor individual, but collective, emerging only through the acceptance of collapse as a precursor to renewal. In this speculative terrain, ruin is not an endpoint but a threshold, a necessary condition for imagining otherwise.
This exhibition is on view at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris until 19 July 2026.
