Bintou Dembélé

Bintou Dembélé is a prominent artist on the French hip-hop scene, Bintou Dembélé has collaborated with artists such as Denis Darzacq, Mohamed Bourouissa, and Sophiatou Kossoko. Shaped by a wide range of influences, her work incorporates repetitive music with rhythmic polyphonies and Street Dance. Bintou Dembélé explores marginalized cultures as well as ritual and corporeal memories, questions notions of gender, probes the wounds of the past and the possibility to move beyond them through strategies of reappropriation and “marronnage.” Her performances draw on various aesthetics from the worlds of dance, music, voice, and the visual arts. In 2020, the Lyon National Opera invited her to put together a solo performance for dancer Merel van Heeswijk. Portrait Photo © Marco Castro Cover Photo © Eric Batolucci