THE ART PROJECT: MONUMENT AUX VIVANT·E·S

Several generations of men and women who became slaves were transported, traded, humiliated and mutilated, mistreated, killed without burial and died without a name. How can we mourn them? Inspired by the Kübler-Ross model – which theorizes the concept of mourning as a series of phases supposed to lead to its acceptance – Gaëlle Choisne deploys within the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the former Palace of the Colonies built for the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, a series of gestures, works and moments as so many stages destined to the construction of a Monument to the living – among which a sculptural work that will be installed, in 2023, within the permanent exhibition path of the museum. The former Palais des Colonies carries a painful and conflicting history that we must bring to light in order to question and propose some ways to try to honor our ancestors.© D.R.

CHOC – FIRST STAGE OF MONUMENT AUX VIVANT·E·S
Monument aux Vivant-e-s – CHOC – takes on the traumatic historical process of the slave trade and slavery. Since 2006, France has chosen May 10 to commemorate the memory of these crimes against humanity and their abolition. This year, on this day of mourning, Gaëlle Choisne sets up the space of the Forum du Palais to invite the public to an evening of communion and contemplative meditation played and sung, in a minimal sculptural gesture. Accompanying naturally the mourning from its beginnings, the song, the music and the psalmody transmute the energies of the shock into collective moments of sharing and solidarity.

With :
– Maré Mananga, an amateur Afrofeminist choir that expresses the repertoires of the Afro diaspora.
– Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess, DJ, producer, writer and artist, concerned with bringing to light past and present sub-cultures.
– Sophye Soliveau, a singer and harpist who has been nourished by Afro-American music since childhood, is a member of the Seksion Maloya collective (traditional music from Reunion Island) and Àbájade (an Afrojazz group with Cuban influences) on lead vocals, choirs and percussion. She also directs several vocal ensembles (Maré Mananga, Oshun and the Choral Workshop).
– And the backing singers Kelly Carpaye, Eden Tinto Collins, Joseph Decange, Frieda, and Pierre Et La Rose.

Fourth step in the construction of the Monument aux Vivant-e-s by artist Gaëlle Choisne, FESTIVAL DÉPRESSION mixes cinema, music and performance to address the « mental decompression » caused by the violence suffered by racialized people.

In the grieving process, depression is the troubled moment of latency when one has no strength or hope. « Depression » also refers to the idea of decompression. For Gaëlle Choisne, the denunciation of the « generalized state of depression » among certain racialized people, linked to racism and the injustices they face, leads to a beginning of mental decompression.

In the Forum, the artist invites to a kind of collective care performed, thanks to the music and the word of her guests.

Gaëlle Choisne pays homage to the Haitian composer Carmen Brouard through her work And the sea says nothing, a silent film game, accompanied by musicians Lutxi Nesprias and Julen Zelaia who play La sonate vodouesque.
On the stage work Rainbow Tears, author and actress Jo Güstin celebrates black and queer culture by taking the audience on a journey through its legends. Ndayé Kouagou, artist and performer, follows her with an enigmatic performance based on his writings on discomfort, power and vulnerability.

The new NW is inaugurated with the opening exhibition Ritual in Transfigured Time, named after the 1946 short film of the same name by Maya Deren (Kiev, 1917–New York, 1961). Deren, whose life was driven by a desire for freedom, was a guiding light for us in devising the exhibition and film programme, as well as the principles of our revitalised organisation: dialogue, collaboration, experiment and the breaking down of boundaries. Many of life’s changes are accompanied by rituals. Rituals help us to navigate liminal phases, the moments between two positions or roles. At the momentary threshold between the old and new NW, we celebrate this radical metamorphosis. Here, in this place, we invite artists to scrutinise, face up to and recreate realities, whether through enchantment or resistance. For Deren, transformation meant treading both paths: dance as poetic self-expression and as a form of liberation. The exhibition opens with Deren’s 16mm film Ritual in Transfigured Time. The film is a ‘documentary of the inner self’, as the artist herself described it. In Deren’s view, ritual dance brought about a ‘depersonalisation’, where the dancer, supported by the community, could be liberated from social and cultural limitations. In this work, the dancing body assumes the space to experience suppressed freedoms once more without limit, to escape from the oppression of the everyday.

Gaëlle Choisne presents a tear-shaped stage and a film made together with dancer Kettly Noël and guitarist Daniele Morelli following the principles of improvisation and transfiguration. Carlotta Bailly-Borg presents an installation with sandblasted glass doors referring to the notion of the momentary threshold, as well as a series of paintings of timeless, forward- flowing figures. Onyeka Igwe interweaves colonial archive footage with her own visual language in an attempt to reclaim Black dance from the colonial project. Ula Sickle explores the concept of a ‘cinematic camera’ in recordings of dance rehearsals for her performance Holding Present, which was a collaboration with Ictus, the Brussels-based ensemble for contemporary music. Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca show how Frevo, a traditional Brazilian dance, places the self-representation and autonomy of the dancer first. Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust treats the costume like a score that grants the performer a new sensory perception of their body. (LA)HORDE offers a contemporary take on dance as ritual within the context of music festivals, collective joy and mass consumption. None of the artworks in this opening exhibition use spoken language; instead, it is only the body that speaks. Under circumstances where speaking becomes pressured or even impossible, artists have been known to find other ways to open doors and let in the unknown.

Authors: Godart Bakkers, Laura Herman