Babacar Thiaw
Surfing as a Catalyst for Change
summer 2025
WORDS Emmett Levy
PHOTOGRAPHY Brandon Harrison
When educator, entrepreneur, and activist Babacar Thiaw surfs, he feels connected to the legacy of his ancestors, bygone stewards of the waves. The feeling is far too personal to share; when asked if he could recount this moment of revelation, he respectfully refused.
Babacar grew up in Yoff, a traditional fishing village in Dakar, Senegal. At six years old, he learned to surf at beaches laden with styrofoam, mangled bags, and bottles. Per capita, Senegal dumps five times more plastic into the ocean than the United States, around 783,000 tons per year. The pollution devastates Senegal’s marine ecosystems and burdens its fishing and tourism industries.
His activism was spurred in 2010, when surfing at a local beach, Babacar confronted a thick miasma—a mass of trash so dense he could barely ride a wave. He was compelled to act; “We have received the ocean from our ancestors, from our elders. So to be grateful for them, we have to keep it for the next generation.”
During this nine-month period of work, Pereira explored multiple thematic expressions. "It depends on who I am when I wake up each day. It depends on which card I look at and in which moment of life—of emotional state I am in," she says of the project. "It seemed that every day I would wake up with a new revelation about them. It's about misogyny! It's about flamboyancy! It's about hating men! It's about loving men! It's about the female gaze taking back its power! The truth is it's about all of these things and none of these things, and depicting those complex feelings in a satirical way; bringing lightness and play to heaviness."
She sees each character both as a self-portrait and simultaneously as representing the female gaze toward men. "When asked why I’ve used mostly men in my work, I realized it's not dissimilar to how male painters would have women sit for them—as muse and as object to mold as they wish." In this way she holds power over each miniature figure, how she constructs and views them. In this process, she moves to reclaim power over her positionality, while layering on nuance and play to the collected fragments. Collaging together new, more complex, versions of previously printed realities.
In 2018, Babacar decided to turn his family restaurant, the
Copacabana Surf Village, into the first-ever zero-waste restaurant in Senegal. Copacabana has
become a bastion of environmental activism, hosting educational programs, beachside cleanups,
and meetings for grassroots organizing. It has since influenced nearly 100 restaurants in Senegal
to follow suit and eliminate their use of single-use plastics.
For each of the 54 individual cards, Celina begins with postures and expressions, both from herself and her subjects. First searching for sentiment in her figures, she then re-combs through source material for the colors, textures and objects that would help her build each scene, creating a prep or mise en place, and an assembly area to pull from. The process is a balance of intentionality and chance, with some numbers and suites aligning with specific messaging—like the number seven aligning with religious themes of Catholicism, Queens with feminine power and energy, and of course the heart suite touching on all matters of the heart, good and bad.
The delicacy of decades-old materials and the interwoven reflections and voices of 54 cards come together to form CARTAS, a collective memory and open letter whose message is only fully realized by the viewer.
Pereira's works have been exhibited and acquired for collections domestically and abroad. She has been commissioned for esteemed publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and more. ❤
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