Solo exhibition, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2022
difé, installation with ceramic, calabash, burnt wood, rope, cotton thread
Titled difé, meaning «fire» in Creole, her solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo continues with the installation Nuit in the group exhibition Shéhérazade, la nuit. Natural, transformed, or manufactured materials, realities and fictions, figures and metaphors intertwine and punctuate the spaces. They guide as much as they constrain movement and perception, imposing a certain slowness on the body.
The difé exhibition traces a path between figures of banana trees made of burnt wood and ceramic pathways forming a fra- gile and shifting alphabet on the walls. The banana tree evokes the history of Guadeloupe, its brutal exploitation, its monocultures for export, and the ongoing ecocide caused by the use of chlordecone, a pesticide employed between the 1970s and 1990s in plantations with the complicity of the French state, which continues to poison the soil, water, and inhabitants to this day. The presence of fire reflects an imaginary shaped by a land transformed by the volcanic activity of La Soufrière a voice of lava that alters, expands, and reshapes. A gentle fire that consumes silence.
Rooted in a personal archaeology that considers the body as a territory of relation and in relation, the artist transposes a real place marked by various traumatic events into a psychological landscape.
© Aurélien Mole