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LAST SHOWS / EXPOSITIONS RÉCENTES
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ARTISTIC DOSSIER 2025

La Ronde des vies bonnes (2025)

Wall drawing (chalk on ultramarine blue and smoke black / Dimension : 23 x 4 m)
Soundwork (2025, portuguese (Brazil), french, english, creole from Guadeloupe and Haiti, 3H00, 5.0)
« Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice » – São Paulo Biennial (6.09.25 – 11.01.26)
(curators Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, Keyna Eleison)

The Round of Good Lives is a journey that traces the stories and imaginaries of Afro-confluent cultures between Brazil and the Caribbean, leaving Europe in the distant periphery. This map imagines a territory where three black ‘islands’ (Brazil, Guadeloupe and Haiti) connect and interact in a shared history, human and non-human, visible and invisible, a monstrous history where new peoples and territories emerge from the oceans, bays and rivers to demand reparation. Taking black carnival and popular practices (Nego Fugido, Caretas de Mingau, Nèg Gwo Siwo, Lansèt Kód…) as his starting point, Olivier Marboeuf imagines another form of archive, full of cunning and masquerade, an archive of the body, sensual, fabulous, delirious, cacophonous. Far from exotic and pacifying narratives, this archive is one of colonial debt, of its violent legacies, past and present. The dates and counting of/accounting for the dead resurface in the white of sugar covering the blue of indigo and the grimacing masks of Black memory.
With The Round of Good Lives, Olivier Marboeuf writes a new chapter in his graphic and sound manifesto in a world burning with the flames of capitalist vanity. After a research residency in the Bahia region and São Paulo, the artist presents a new sound piece that combines stories and songs collected in the Caribbean with Brazilian voices and ghosts. From the Carandiru prison to the call of the Caretas de Mingau and the struggles of Black women for emancipation through theatre, all these rebellious voices shake the walls to demand justice, dignity and sovereignty for good lives, free of debt.

Soundwork (2025, portuguese (Brazil), french, english, creole from Guadeloupe and Haiti, 3H00, 5.0)

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From fire to fire (2025)

Lecture – performance on June 18th, 2025 in front of an improvised score drawn with white chalk on an ultra-marine blue wall at CIVA (Bruxelles) as part of an evening dedicated to Kayfa Ta editions and my next book to come with that publisher : « How to live from fire to fire »
An event produced by Centre Pompidou – Kanal (Photographies © veerle vercauteren)

Péyi en retour (2025)

Wall drawing (chalk on ultramarine blue / Dimension : 18,1 x 3,95 m)
Soundwork (2025, French, english, spanish, creole from Guadeloupe and Haiti, 1H54, 5.1)
Collective show « Après la fin : cartes pour un autre avenir » (february-september 2025)
Centre Pompidou – Metz (France, 2025)
curateur / curator : Manuel Borja-Villel

© Photo : Marc Domage / Exposition Après la fin / 2025

Fragment #1 (vidéo)

Chants, contes, récits et lectures (songs, storytelling, readings)
Guadeloupe : Catherine Dénécy dite Ca.Dé, Florence Naprix, George Lodin, Olivier Marboeuf, Dory Sélèsprika
Martinique : Gwladys Gambie
Haïti : Cynthia Maignan, James Desiris, Rossi Jacques Casimir, Zakh Turin
Porto-Rico : Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Royaume-Uni : Shela Sheikh
Caribbean Colombia : Mario Alberto Llanos
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Musiques :
Aldo Midleton, Tambour-KA et petites percussions
Guy Fromager, flûte traversière et saxophone ténor
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Enregistrements voix et musiques / recordings
Makali Douglas au Bay la vwa studio, Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe)
En coproduction avec / in coproduction with
Association Eco-Sonore-Guadeloupe
Montage / éditing
Olivier Marboeuf & Victor Donati
Création sonore, réalisation et mixage / Soundwork and mix
Victor Donati
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Textes / Texts :
Dory Sélèsprika reads Tan (Dory Sélèsprika, éditions du net 2013)
Olivier Marboeuf reads the introduction of « la Charte du G.O.N.G » (1963)
Ca.Dé reads Dette à parler (Olivier Marboeuf, 2024)
Shela Sheikh reads Blue Blue Island Blue (Olivier Marboeuf, 2025)
Florence Naprix, George Lodin, Cynthia Maignan, James Désiris sing traditional haitian songs
All the other texts and storytelling are from the authors.

Article de Ludovic Lamant (Médiapart, juillet 2025)

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L’île de la dette en retour (2024)

(chalk on a wall painted in ultramarine blue) : 5,7 x 4 m
Collective show « Eloge de la submersion« 
La Compagnie (Marseille, 2024)
Cur. Dénètem Touam Bona
+ lecture/performance « Mille sortes de bleu »

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A liquid monument (2024)

chalk on ultra-marine blue (on site wall drawing, 3,5 x 7 m ) as part of Museum of Breath
Collective show « When solidarity is not a metaphor« 
Venice Biennale, 2024
cur. Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (with Simona Dvorák, Kevin Jones et Zaina Zaarour)

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Ici (on noie des archives) (2024)

(craie sur mur bleu in situ 2,5 x 1,8 m)
Exposition « Mémoires des hauts-fonds » – Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris (2024)
Curation : Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez & Mathieu K. Abonnenc

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Médiation conteuse (2023)

Galerie Art Mûr (craie sur mur bleu in situ + vidéo, 3 x 5 m)
Biennale Transnationale Noire AF-Flux – Montréal (2023)

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Matière indocile (2024)

Oboro (craie sur mur bleu in situ 4 x 8 m – détails)
Biennale Transnationale Noire AF-Flux – Montréal (2024)

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Lanjelis (2022)

Wall drawings for The Living and the Dead Ensemble’s solo show
Badischer Kunstverein – Karlsruhe (Germany)
30th june – 15 November 2022

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Museum of Breath (2022)

BERLIN BIENNALE 2022
cur. Kader Attia
5 sound works from the serie « The Museum of Breath » (press the link to listen)

Who has the right to live in Europe? Who is allowed to live a decent and dignified life—a good life—in Europe? And who gets to decide? Who do we want to hear? Fugitive voices are beginning to speak. From the South of the North, from the East of the West(1), from unknown places they speak and de-speak, recounting the quotidian violence that constantly threatens lives that do not matter. They speak and de-speak about resistance, care, and transmission—about anger too—and they invent tools and ways to stay alive. They talk about extreme attention, paranoia. And joy too. But they are not there to bear witness. There is enough testimony, enough police. They make up stories because they never sleep. They plant a garden on the toxic soil of Fortress Europe. Each sound work, through the ruses of language and storytelling, shares a fragment of a living manifesto, its legal or speculative strategies imagined by hybrid groups of activists, militants, residents, artists, authors, archivists, researchers, lawyers, and other legal specialists, but none of the participants command authority over any other. They make up another kind of night for cacophonic forms of life. And we dive into the multilingualism of an assembly guided by a storyteller and its own poetic form. But those voices do not exist; they speak from their nonexistence to us. Call them what you want: call them breaths.

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PROJECTS / PROJETS
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« Distant Islands, Spectral Cities »
Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship (2023-2024)
(scroll for English)

J’ai le plaisir d’avoir reçu, il y a quelques mois, avec mon projet « Distant Islands, Spectral Cities », le Banister Fletcher Global Global Fellowship pour l’année académique 2023/24, accueilli par l’Institut de l’Université de Londres à Paris (ULIP). Au fil de ce travail en cours, je publie une série de notes pour partager quelques-unes des ambitions et des questions structurant cette recherche qui se concrétisera par des textes, invitations et conversations ainsi qu’un temps fort à Paris en avril 2024 et des évènements satellites à Londres. Ce fellowship prend pour objet les formes d’émancipation et d’imagination politiques et esthétiques de populations minorisées en Europe, en considérant leur fragilité. Il tient également compte de la précarité de gestes de recherche confrontés de manière grandissante à des effets systémiques puissants qui remettent en cause une part de leur éthique en menaçant la production de communs de savoir. « Distant Islands, Spectral Cities » marque ainsi le point de départ d’une méthode de tissage collectif qui initiera « une communauté d’interprétation » dont l’objectif est de continuer de se développer autour d’un lieu de confiance, de collaboration et de s’élargir au-delà de cette première série d’évènements et de rencontres.
JOURNAL BANISTER FLETCHER FELLOWHIP n°1

I am delighted to have been awarded the 2023/24 Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship for my project ‘Distant Islands, Spectral Cities’, hosted by the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). As the work unfolds, I am publishing a series of notes that share some of the ambitions and questions driving the research, which will result in texts, invitations and conversations as well as a week of gatherings in Paris in April 2024, with satellite events in London. The project focuses on forms of political and aesthetic emancipation and imagination within minority populations in Europe, taking into account their fragility. It will do this while always keeping in view the precariousness that increasingly makes our research processes also prone to fragility, to the powerful systemic effects that undermine their ethics by threatening the production of knowledge commons. ‘Distant Islands, Spectral Cities’ marks the starting point of a collective weaving method that will initiate a ‘community of interpretation’ whose objective is to continue to develop around a site of trust and collaboration and expand beyond this first series of events and encounters.
JOURNAL BANISTER FLETCHER FELLOWHIP n°1

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