Edouard Glissant writes “The first darkness came from being torn away from the everyday country, from the patron gods, from the tutelary community”, and in this sense, Gaëlle Choisne’s thaumaturgic touch serves to re-establish an order, to heal a wound, to reconstitute the broken balance between us and the planet. Born in Northern France, to a Haitian mother and a Breton father, her autobiography bears the indelible marks of colonialism that remain in certain aspects of her artistic production and that see Haiti as a microcosm generating energetic reflections in the rest of the world.

Her modus operandi starts from a physical and spiritual relationship with materials and the use of various media: from sculpture, to videos made from found footage, to installations that build an abacus of linguistic hybridities in the complexity of a culture that combines vernacular elements with those of globalisation.

An inquisitive traveller, she builds, with objects found by chance, instruments useful for the creation of contexts poised between the wonder of the miracu- lous and the terror of the sublime; her work is interspersed with collections of rediscovered things, some of which have been preserved for many years, such as talismans, amulets, playing cards, or fetishes that take on curative functions. These collections also convey the artist’s interest in esotericism and spirituality. The exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, is built from groups of new works, the result of a new creative experimentation, made with a total hetero- geneity of materials: from cement, to cardboard, to metals, to flowers such as the helicrisium, commonly called immortal flower in French-speaking countries. This metaphor urges us to understand the relationship between us and the soul of the world through an inexhaustible energy to which we all, in various ways, contribute. The path built inside the A SUD gallery constitutes an unrepeatable, spiritual, and multi-sensorial experience.

Composed like Cecil Taylor’s mirror-music, the present exhibition recounts the vibratory encounter between Lorna Simpson and Gaëlle Choisne, punctuated by their comings and goings towards each other, like the fleeting notations of a score in the making for a four- hand piece. Intertwined from one floor to the other for the duration of the joint performance that is their exhibition, their works oscillate between the archives of the present and the reper- toire of the contemporary. Simpson’s works—her paintings, of apparent formal coherence, her conceptual photographs imbued with serial rigor—and Choisne’s—collages and assemblages of apparently chaotic or rather «chaordic» facture, between order and chaos, to borrow the artist’s expression, and truly esoteric, even mystical compositions—do not seek harmony within themsel- ves any more than between them.

As black women artists their Afro-diasporic filiation is the taut red thread of their practice, between representation, abstraction and documentation, bifurcation and obfuscation of and in their sources, breaking with essentialist assignations as much as steering away from the search of rootedness. Their native and adoptive Caribbean genealogy, from one generation to the next— Cuban and Jamaican for Lorna—Haitian for Gaëlle with Mexican and Cuban influences—trans- cribes their globalized experiences and transcends their circumstantial American and French ci- tizenship, respectively.

In this unique and unprecedented joint exhibition, a common attention to nature as an endangered species, erupts between the image of women and traditional representations of the landscape. Polar in Lorna’s work, tropical in Gaëlle’s, nature discovers and covers black faces and racialized spaces through visual cracks in the canvas while left-over concrete slates, cardboard ribbings, brass mesh, and chained shells unite and separate life and art in a vast «material squabbling»* (Choisne).

Claire Tancons

Exhibition Curator