Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Chromatics is a piece that is both poetical and political. Poetical because it is fundamentally made of two poems, that were created in a manner similar to the researches of the Oulipo, a literary movement created in the 1960s, which introduced mathematics and randomness in literary creation. I used a program to randomly combine words to form stanzas made of four one-word lines, the first and the third word/line being, in Movement I, necessarily "black" or "white," and the second and fourth word/line being one of the 200 other words. In Movement II, the first and third lines are either "black", "blue", "red", and "white". Chromatics is also a political piece, because beyond its poetical aspect it is also a conceptual piece, and it aims to be a radically anti-racist piece, aimed at destroying the conceptual, linguistic and symbolic roots of racism.
As an artist, the experience of being at the crossroads of several diasporas is directly linked to the fundamental concept of all my work, which the concept of "contexture", the notion of mixing elements in a particular context, in a moving and polysemic way, as opposed to the static notion of structure.
My personal experience is very particular: I grew up in Benin, then lived in France and the United States, and I currently share my time between Benin and France, which makes me at the same time an African autochthon and a member of the diaspora. While I was living in Salvador in 2019 for two months, thanks to the Goethe Institut / Videobrasil residency award I received in 2017, I jokingly referred to myself as a "retornado retornando".
This ancestry played and continues to play a major perspective in my practice: simplicity is an illusion. The agudá—families with Portuguese surnames in Benin—are a mix of four different communities: the Portuguese and Brazilian slave traffickers, the freed Brazilian slaves that decided to go back to Africa after they earned their freedom, the expelled African Brazilians that were suspected to have taken part in the Malê Revolt, and also, let's not forget, the slaves locally owned in Benin by these different groups, that took the names of their owners.