Basile Boli, Pape Diouf, and Mody Diop, at their arrival in Dakar following Marseille’s Champions League win. 1993.
Bottega Veneta has initiated a new partnership with Air Afrique magazine, a new platform for Afro-diasporic art and conversation. The magazine, conceived by a young collective in Paris and inspired by the pan-African magazines of the 20th century, will launch with an event at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on 23 June 2023.
Air Afrique is named after the pan-African airline Air Afrique, co-owned by Senegal, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, Congo, and Chad, and operational between 1961 and 2002. An important expression of recently independent countries and of a certain pan-African ideal, the airline became a major patron of arts and culture, as well as a means of cross-border transportation.
“We want to revive the African transcendence that Air Afrique represented. Our mission is to preserve this heritage, to put Air Afrique back in the cultural conversation, and to build on their example of cultural engagement.” Lamine Diaoune.
“Air Afrique was more than an airline. It was a cultural platform,” Djiby Kebe.
The brand will also release a limited-edition series of blankets by Franco-Sudanese designer, Abdel El Tayeb, a designer in the Bottega Veneta studio. Specially commissioned by Matthieu Blazy to mark the launch of Air Afrique, each blanket is a unique composition of the finest wool, silver leather, and shearling from the Bottega Veneta archive.
