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.

The artist Gaëlle Choisne introduces the living into the rooms of the museum: she welcomes the visitors’ bodies as the very subject of the project and implements the principle of hospitality so precious to the MAC VAL, in order to consider and care for them. Invited to invest the spaces of the museum, Gaëlle Choisne proposes a total project that takes place in her exploration of Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux, entitled « Temple of Love », a realization implemented for several years in different places as it was for example the case at Bétonsalon, in 2018.

This new occurrence at the MAC VAL, Atopos, is declined in the heart of the exhibition space of the collection « Bare Hands », in front of other works. Through furniture and sculptural devices it proposes forms of reception of the public, inviting them to participate and listen to artistic interventions programmed by the artist: philosopher, artist, musician, anthropologist, masseur… about twenty interventions will take place in these installations that can be activated during one year.

Gaëlle Choisne accompanies the works in the collection with living things, with what is the very essence of humanity: philosophy, thought, contact, the thirst to become, germination, life.
Here, once again, his project is placed under the sign of love and relationships with others, an experience to live love as a political, social and solidarity response.
An ecosystem at the service of the living.

Love, a word that makes us blush. So we translate it into ‘Wicked!’ or into actions.
At the MAC VAL, in Vitry-sur-Seine, I invite all visitors to be careful with this word so delicate that we vulgarise it or do not speak it. Here, it is yours and for you, for all of you, but especially for the mino-rities, for those left behind, for the abandoned, for the sidelined, for the originals. It accompanies your steps and everything you see from me is made with it. I am trying to tell you that you are unique, original and never interchangeable, you are singular creatures to be loved and I invite you to start with yourself. Take this chance to settle down, to feel through the breath of your lives, through the struggles but also through the laughter, through a sigh, a soothing. I offer you spaces in the museum, a lull in a benevolent place, to feel good, to do sport, to find yourself. The museum is indeed a place that is made for this, not only for connoisseurs or professionals, but for all those who want to expe-rience, to feel.Ode to love for all! (Gaëlle Choisne)

Guests
— Les Apprenant*e*s de l’école des actes
— Marie-Carmel Brouard
— Contemporaines
— Gabriel Fontana
— Caroline Honorien
— Nge Lay et Aung Ko
— Roxanne Maillet et Célia Gaultier
— Gloria Maso
— Pascale Obolo et Afrikadaa
— Anouchka Oler Nussbaum
— Elisabetta Potasso
— Emmanuelle Soum

Temple of Love – To Hide at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, is a new phase of Temple of Love – a long-term project aiming at a global reunification of the living through the concept of love. This exhibition, freely inspired by the chapter ‘To hide’ in Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, is resolutely oriented towards self-recon-struction through the sharing of experience, connec-tion to one’s ancestors, respect for heritage and inner corporal harmony.

With Ahuehuete, Pablo Altar, Arghtee, ASMR STACY, Association Agonessan, Mykki Blanco, Marie-Carmel Brouard, Cardi B, Jean Chesnel, Crystallmess, Virginie Despentes, Sidney Drew, Léo Dupré, Silvia Federici, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Zoe Leonard, Audre Lorde, Agnes Noel, Euvonie Reynald and Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira, Madame Café, Karl Marx, Nicki Minaj, Djibril Sall, Spice, Lorenzo Targhetta, Christiane Taubira, Simone Thiébaut, Assa Traoré, Françoise Vergès, Amber Wagner, Tierra Whack.

Blue Lights in the Basement is the first solo exhibition by French-Haitian artist Gaëlle Choisne in the UK. Describing her work as a ‘kaleidoscopic prism with multiple entries of meanings and signs’, Choisne’s practice revolves around the creation of opulent environments in which the artist interweaves myriad references – from occult fables to objective sciences, through to Caribbean and European literary traditions, queer culture, music and popular imagery –, and media, including sculpture, photography, video, text and sound.

In Blue Lights in the Basement, Choisne presents a series of hybrid assemblages made of a wide range of materials such as wood, textile, ceramic, photographs and moving images, as well as a vast array of found objects, including coins, banknotes, deer antlers and cigarettes. Layering a multitude of narratives, the artworks on display explore the relationships between human beings and their environment – whether it be social, cultural or natural –, analysing the effects that these interactions have on subjectivity. To do so, the artist brings a historical perspective to her own experience, establishing poetic parallels between her personal life, her relationship to sexuality and her skin colour, and the history of Haiti, specifically the Haitian Revolution (22 August 1791–1 January 1804).

Throughout the exhibition, Choisne draws inspiration from the women who played a role in the Revolution and the broader history of Haiti, such as slave and soldier Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, who served in a male uniform at the Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot (4 March–24 March 1802), or Catherine Flon, who sew the first Haitian flag in 1803. Often muted by historiography, these female voices embody a spirit of bravery and rebellion, affirming the existence of those left out of dominant historical narratives. Through the evocation of these providential figures, the artist questions the way in which processes of invisibilisation operate, drawing our attention to what happens beyond the regimes of the visible and the tangible – in both socio-political and spiritual realms, which Choisne’s transversal gaze tightly interlinks.

Indeed, a logic of crossing, of passage between perceptible and ineffable worlds, spans the exhibition, such as, for instance, in Anathem (2022), a group of three assemblages evoking the form of doors or thresholds. Made of pine wood, ceramic, dyed fabric and printed textile showing, alternatively, a hand (the maker), a magician and a public demonstration (the revolted), the Anathem series evokes the intricate links between practices calling for socio-political justice and rituals aiming to reach a spiritual ‘beyond’.

These connections between history and spirituality, politics and beliefs, also appear in Echo of your EGO (2022), an installation in which cigarettes produced by one of the oldest brands of tobacco (Sobranie, established in London in 1879, smoked by the Imperial House of Russia and the Royal House of Great Britain, owned today by Japan Tobacco), materially encapsulate residues of colonial times. These cigarettes are presented on blocks of ceramic covered by an enamel made of crushed glass taken from hospital needles, recalling the cyclical dance of life and death, as in a vanity.

Similarly, the film Silent Primitive Accumulation (2018–22), which is played on mute to remind us of those who remain voiceless, is presented as part of a series of installations in which the screens are supported by metal, root-like feet, giving the impression of an energetic web sprawling from the underground. Here, the notion of ‘basement’, as suggested by the exhibition title, seems to refer to these unconscious forces that even those who have been disempowered can potentially access.

Indeed, borrowed from an album released by African American singer and activist Roberta Flack in 1977, Blue Lights in the Basement evokes the deep, sensual atmosphere of clubs when slow music is played. It also refers to David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, presented at Ace Gallery, New York, in 2002, a sensory experience where ‘light failed to provide full visibility, and colour remained helpless in grounding materiality’, bringing a singular prism to questions of race, essence and spirituality.

Similar ideas are explored in Choisne’s exhibition, where the colour blue becomes the symbol of what has been made imperceptible or impalpable, but whose presence continues to haunt reality. Attempting to conjure the effective power and potential of invisible energies, her artworks are not conceived as inert objects, illustrative or evocative of external ideas, but as force fields, composed of both physical and immaterial components. Within this framework, the image of the basement is used to conjure the idea of a hidden space where reproved practices, such as queer cruising, persist in existing; a space where, acting as the glue that holds the building blocks of her assemblages together, love is the ultimate sediment.