Mapping the Earth's Embrace: Queer Life-Building in Mame-Diarra Niang's Éthérée

“The only place that welcomes you and opens its arms to you after you die,” Mame-Diarra Niang tells me, “is the earth. It's the only place you can be at home. But for us, homosexuals, it is the only place where we are unwelcome.” [Le seul endroit qui t'accueille et qui t'ouvre les bras quand tu meures, c'est la terre. C'est le seul endroit où tu es chez toi. Mais nous, les homosexuels, c'est le seul endroit où on n'est pas accueillis.]¹Niang, an Afro-diasporic visual artist with ties to Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and France states this as she explains the origins of her performance-installation Éthérée. She had learned of the hate crime against Madièye Diallo, a young, gay, Senegalese AIDS activist who was HIV positive and died in 2009. After his death, Diallo's corpse was exhumed from a Muslim cemetery in Thiès, Senegal by anti-gay vigilantes and...