Installations

Chromatics

Chromatics is a piece grounded in the necessity of a radical fight against racism, «radical» meaning that the fight should also be symbolic and conceptual in order to achieve two goals: first, exposing and eradicating racialization conditioning that creates through automatic thinking a mainly subconscious linguistic «apartheid» (Black/non-Black, White/non-White) that has very real social and political consequences ;

Then proposing a human-centric perspective towards political action based on transeth-nic human values to replace ethno-centric essentialisations and categori-zations. Chapter I (Initiation) is a randomly generated poem containing 40 000 stanzas of four one-word lines.

The stanzas are created by a program that combines 200 three-to-five-letters most common nouns in the English language, with the words «black» and «white». All the stanzas are reversible.

In Chapter II (Resolution) the program creates a 160 000 stanzas poem this time with four color adjectives : «black», «blue», «red», «white». Chapter II contains Chapter I but both explodes and expands it.

The poems are expressed or manifested in any possible form depending on the exhibition space, displayed on video, inscribed on paper, posters, books or mirrors, sewn, drawn, or spoken, printed on T-shirts and worn, performed rhythmically in morse code or through symbols, combined with other images, etc.

Handroid City

Handroid City (2019) combines art and research on the subject of the Digital Revolution in the Global South and its materialization (as opposed to the symmetrical dematerialization it induces) through transcultural, transnational and networked "digital districts"

Created for Cosmopolis #2.0 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it is a 17-screen installation immersing the visitors into a panoptic and kaleidoscopic non-linear narrative.

The work was created in Benin, Brazil, China, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Brazil with the help of Hivos Digital Earth program, the British council and Swedish Ministry of Culture, Videobrasil and the Goethe Institute VillaSul program.

)U(

)U( is a piece about self-liberation through self-awareness and presence. Its intention is to create an “anti-panopticon” or a “heterotopia”, by reference to French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (A human is a human through other humans) - Zulu proverb

Je est un autre (I is another) - Arthur Rimbaud

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. - W.E.B. DuBois.

Thirty-two video cameras film the whole space of the installation, displayed on four monumental projections and eight screens scattered in the installation, allowing the visitors to see themselves and the other visitors from every angle and distance.

Mirrors are disposed in the installation space, allowing for the infinite multiplication of the visitors’ images.

Farsights neon pieces switched on by rhythmically set timers illuminate the installation in three colors, black, red and white, transforming its atmosphere, emulating day, night, dusk and dawn.

Other in situ neon compositions outlining the exhibition space are switched on by movement detectors.

The soundtrack of the installation mixes cinematic atmospheres, natural sounds and abstract textures.

The Reflections mirror paintings and their “koans” trigger self-awareness, whereas the Farsights neon pieces based on Fa’s odu or symbols (Fa or Ifa is a West African philosophy and geomancy) allude to the spiritual self’s freedom: Fa’s essential message is that a humans are not predestined, but forge their own destiny in harmony with spiritual energies.

Finally, the Future ancestors series statues (inspired by Egungun ceremonies from Benin and Nigeria) allude to the the finitude of the «I», reminders of both history and the human condition: each and every human is a «future ancestor», but totally alive in the present moment.