X Berlin Bienniale We don't need another hero, Berlin, 2018
Installation and video projection
Project realized with the support of the Xth Berlin Bieniale and Horizn Biennial Award
Toli Toli uses the spacial metaphor of an old children song to convoke a political and intertwined narrative of the guadeloupean territory. In the poem-video, the “toli toli”(that means”chrysalid of butterfly” in guadeloupean créole) shows directions toward an inner elsewhere, toward places and distances shaped by the presence of coloniality. While telling the story of the landscape where the shadow possess the “power of naming”, two hands seem to weave repeatedly with an invisible matter, understanding the technique of the bamboo weaving as the structure of langage. Both the song and the bamboo weaving technique (used before to realized fish traps) have almost disappeared of the guade- loupean culture/knowledge.
Re-associating the action of weaving with the action of telling, the standing woven-bamboo-sculptures project shad- ows directly on the viewer’s skin and orientate her/his movement through the exhibition space.
Carrying throughout the installation Toli Toli (2018) in a revival of a forgotten past, elderly voices sing a song that was part of a traditional children’s game in rural parts of Basse-Terre, an island of Guadeloupe. In the game, a child would find a toli toli, a butterfly chrysalis the shape of a tiny finger, point it in a direction, and playfully imagine a distant or (un)known destination through the words of the song. Today, the children of Basse-Terre no longer know this song.
Reflecting on knowledge systems, gestures, and narratives that are disappearing or already lost, Minia Biabiany explored the old technique of weaving bamboo fish traps for the installation Toli Toli. With great difficulty the artist managed
to find a fisherman who could teach her this skill. In the work, weaving becomes a metaphor for the painful entanglement of Guadeloupe’s tropical environment with the colonial past and present. Biabiany’s traps cast shadows on the floor. Like ghosts they disappear and reappear, depending on the movement of the viewer through the space. Shifting between revealing and erasing the meshwork of an elusive past, the spectator enters the schizophrenic state of the islands.
©Tim Ohler