My work aims at forging relations beyond preconceived notions of identities by opposing systems of oppressions that shape those categories, through a hybridity of form and discourse and for the sake of a deeper healing of the world. In Safe Spaces for a passing History, I carry out those reconfigurations through a process that I’ve named “scrap painting” where techniques and iconographies drawing from both popular and scholarly references merge. By combining ceramics, pastels, painting, photographs, archive images, talismanic writing and everyday objects upon different media, I tailor the practice of
painting to my own needs and rules, and I strive to highlight the corporeal quality of the metaphysical and political questions that shape my art. In addition to this material aspect, the pieces in Safe Spaces for a passing History open onto a less tangible realm through the use of my mediumistic gifts, and make the boundary between the visible and the invisible permeable: these paintings then become energetic portals which rearrange quantum timelines to reveal new domains of possibilities, and to formulate new ways of existing.

First devised in order to represent historical feminine figures from the black Haitian revolution, these works have since then included a wide range of cultural and political personalities, such as Rihanna and the women warriors of Dahomey, expanding to broader issues of the (non)representation of disadvantaged communities in our memories and imaginations. Therefore, this series is a crucial milestone in my work, where several matters that have accompanied me for a long time converge: by bringing together different eras, various techniques, “lowbrow” and “highbrow” cultures, historical depictions and spiritual dimensions, Safe Spaces for a passing History is a celebration of speculative narratives of artistic and political self-determination, and an ode to the chaordic – as defined by
economist Dee Hock – as a harmonious and organic fusion of order and chaos.

It is precisely in this interval that I create “spaces” of reinvention for the self, which are “safe” because they offer the possibility to the public and myself of building together a vision of the world which we can inhabit, an alternative to the violence of an official, violent and deceptive “History”. To define this new history, I’ve chosen the word “passing” for its ambiguity, as it refers to both the idea of disappearance and strategies of survival adopted by subjugated individuals consisting in embracing customs from the dominant groups who oppress them (especially within dynamics linked to systemic racism, or for the transgender community). Serving both as political toolboxes and as fields of intuitive experimentation, the paintings from this series thus enable what decolonial philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as a “rewriting its own condi tions of impossibility as the conditions of
its possibility” for marginalised subjects. In this way, Safe Spaces for a passing History proposes a form of healing which links the personal and the political together, by harmonizing intimate histories with collective liberation.

In collaboration with Ariane Fleury

Defixio in Latin, κατάδεσμος / katádesmos in ancient Greek, are the most widespread type of evidence that has come down to us of ancient magic from the sixth century BC to the sixth century, throughout the Greco-Roman world. Attested in the literature, the practice literally consists of nailing, binding a person. The aim of defixion would be to subject another human being to one’s will, to render him or her incapable of acting according to one’s own will, a practice nowadays called bewitchment. The defixiones amatoriae aim at attracting a loved one, and this most often in a definitive and immediate way. This exhibition would therefore have the same purpose. To subject human beings to act otherwise than by their own will, in a common destiny in favor of a full consciousness for a respect and a love of the mixed cultures and of the Nature. Défixion is therefore a particular spell. The exhibition appears as the space of a temple destined to offerings of different natures: offerings in gratitude to the universe to allow us to (re)fall in love with it, offerings to forgive mankind for the disasters we commit on Earth or to reflect on the question of giving as with « Do not banish me from your heart ».

The exhibition Temple of Love. Cœur concludes the residency of Gaëlle Choisne (Cherbourg, 1985) at Scuola Piccola Zattere. Here, new commissions, site-specific interventions and existing works by the artist are put in dialogue with a selection of paintings by Haitian artists from the Jean-Marie Drot collection. 

Temple of Love is a long-term project (2018 – ongoing) developing across successive chapters and drawing from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). Through an approach that combines multiple media, techniques and materials, Choisne builds a progressive, evolving narrative that shapes spaces of coexistence and collaboration, hospitality and affection.

What the artist calls a “temple” is this fluid configuration that is temporarily embedded into the architectural and institutional context of the museum, materially and symbolically turning it into a place where new rules and bonds can emerge. The ritual and sacral connotations are summoned by Choisne not to reproduce the auratic dimen- sion of the museum, which derives from acts of separation and classification, but, on the contrary, to hybridize forms of knowledge that belong to different spheres, cultures and histories. 

In the new chapter of Temple of Love, entitled Cœur after the eponymous entry from Barthes’book, the spiritual and affective connection between the body and the outer world is explored through the symbolism of the house: the architecture of the domestic that hosts, embraces, protects. The exhibition space is reconfigured as a complex ecosystem, each room embodying a chakra, the centers located along the spine that regulate the flow of vital energy in the body. Starting with the heart, positioned at the center of museum space, the exhibition unfolds in two directions creating a circular, immersive flow, an invitation by the artist to a healing procession. The identification between architecture and body resonates in the word Lakay, meaning both house and home in the Creole language, that is depicted as a place of encounters, of spoken words, of intimate moments both sad and joyous in Haitian painting. The homeland of the artist’s mother, and a central reference throughout the artist’s work, Haiti is the guest of honor of this project, invited through the works of eighteen Haitian painters belonging to the private collection of French writer and documentary filmmaker Jean-Marie Drot. The works depict everyday scenes of collective activities and country life, blending with allusions to the ceremonies, rituals and symbols of the Vodou religion. Amplifying the scenes, figures and forms found in the paintings, the exhibition weaves a dense, affectionate and generative dialogue with the spiritual mysticism of Haitian art.

The Jean-Marie Drot collection is an idiosyncratic one comprising more than 500 artworks that Jean-Marie Drot (1929-2015) gathered during his lifetime travelling as a journalist and producer for French television. A pioneer in the use of audiovisual material in culture, Drot became well known thanks to his 1962 series The hot hours in Montparnasse in which he interviewed important figures coming from the Dada and Surrealist movements, such as Man Ray, Cocteau, and Duchamp. However, Drot’s passion focused on naif art, especially self-taught artists, from 1968 when he dis- covered an exhibition catalog with artworks by Yugoslav naif painters. This was the starting point for many adventures that led Drot to seek creative work outside the major artistic movements and Western centers of art, in places such as Bulgaria, Peru, Brazil, Haiti, Greece, Egypt and Japan. Drot’s special interest and expertise in Haitian art led him to direct the video documentary Haiti: A Painted History (1997), and to curate several exhibitions and catalogs, including Journal de voyage en Haïti au pays des peintres de la fête et du vaudou (1974), Haïti: Art Naïf, Art Vaudou (1988) and Haitian Painters: The Encounter of Two Worlds (1992). 

The Drot collection is hosted on the Cycladic island of Ios in Greece in the atypical “house-sculpture” – designed by the Greek artist and his lifelong friend Yannis Yaitis – and in a separate building inside the house complex. It is entitled the Museum of Friendship and, as of today, remains closed to the public. The collection was included in this exhibition as a first attempt at activating it through the prism of contemporary art at the initiative of the curator Eva Vaslamatzi, who has undertaken in-depth research into the Drot collection.

Irene Calderoni and Eva Vaslamatzi