Some events, not all but some

2021

January 26th
Par un chemin dissimulé. Pratiques décoloniales du récit (FR)
Académie Royale des Beaux Arts de Bruxelles (Belgique)

On entend partout aujourd’hui des voix s’élever pour décoloniser quelque chose, comme par l’opération d’un mot magique qui transformerait de mauvaises habitudes en bienveillantes attentions, sans pour autant changer les positions de pouvoir. Difficile de ne pas entendre en réponse à cette fiévreuse cacophonie décoloniale, d’autres voix qui refusent que l’on voile ne serait-ce qu’un instant les lumières éblouissantes des héritages impériaux. Ceux-ci protègent leur statut, là où ceux-là protègent les statues et les pillages d’hier qui ne sont que les dommages collatéraux d’un bien beau projet de civilisation. C’est une douce confusion qu’il faut prendre soin d’éclaircir pour révéler ce que ce vacarme dissimule habilement. Pour ce qui est de la situation des mondes de l’art et de la culture qui va nous intéresser ici, il n’est pas sans intérêt d’observer autant les crispations que les reconfigurations qui traversent les grandes institutions. Et à partir de là, d’essayer d’apercevoir les contours et les puissances d’agir d’un récit décolonial. Bien loin d’un nouveau produit de la diversité culturel, nous y verrons une tentative de parler des conditions même de l’espace dans lequel nous parlons, par un geste qui défait les diversions, les écrans de fumée bien-pensant et rend visible ce qui est non-dit, jeté dans l’ombre. Mais cette esthétique de l’attention, si elle ouvre de nouvelles perspectives et de nouveaux lieux d’énonciation de l’Histoire collective, n’est pas suffisante et nous verrons combien il est nécessaire également de proposer des formes situées pour expérimenter des vies possibles en-dehors d’un monde tramé par les fables et les figures toxiques du monde néolibéral. Nous parlerons alors de manière de dire, d’écrire et d’imaginer qui sont aussi travaillées par certaines responsabilités et nécessités dont la première est de pouvoir respirer en conscience du souffle de ceux qui n’ont pas de voix.

Voir la conférence
https://vimeo.com/513325733

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January 21th – 6.30 pm (Barcelone time)
The ship’s old of images
About the artwork of Tony Cokes
Lecture online hosted by MACBA (Barcelone) as part of a serie of talks about Tony Cokes solo show (Tony Cokes. Music, text, politics)

Exploring Tony Cokes’ rich and intense body of work offers me a new opportunity to consider examples of what I call a de-speaking cinema –  in other words an ensemble of strategies that aim to produce a minority ecology, places to breathe, at the heart of a toxic audiovisual space. And also a way of using language outside of any dialectics. To dismantle the violence of language through language itself, in a poetics of scrambling.
With Cokes, we find many attempts to weave together this world in the shadow of images, which is particularly pertinent at a time when queer and/or racialized bodies have become the new libidinal matter of visual arts, television, and advertising. In sum, the new resources for late capitalism. If Cokes’ videos allow us to glimpse behind and underneath the hyper-visibility of certain bodies new forms of extractivism and exhaustion, they also reveal how much the most dazzling and ecstatic performances hide powerful forces of invisibilization andexecution. His works summon forms of attention for what is hidden in the ship’s hold of images and texts, attention for their invisible economy. This practice of attention – which I link to heritage(s) of the feminist critique of storytelling – takes on a particular form with Cokes, through the act of repetition, of remix, which in no way signifies an eternal return, but rather a detour by way of and toward that which is not immediately seen, understood, felt – the ghost of the text.
Rather than a simple aesthetic borrowed from pop culture, I will attempt to re-insert the act of repetition and remix into the history of a dub cinema that imagines the echo as a form of knowledge and language specific to African American and Caribbean culture, where the spiral of storytelling and poetry, the accumulation of voices, try to offer another rhythm, more thinly spread out and rhizomatic to thought, and another inhabited space, both choral and cacophonous.  I will try to reveal the presence of a particular corporeality in the stark forms of the artist, the sound of a collective body, but also the call for the body of the spectator to become a space for a delirious (re)composition of History, a mixing desk. Lastly, alongside Cokes I will pose a final question concerning the body and its metabolism: what are the capacities of art for digesting toxic discourse and images and for transforming them into the (primary) matters of an inhabitable place?
https://www.macba.cat/en/exhibitions-activities/activities/lets-talk-tony-cokes

2020

November 21th, 2020
Lecture – online
as part of Open School : Intersection of care by Loraine Furter and Florence Cheval
Wiels (Belgium)

text to come : The first thing I would like to say to introduce my intervention into the space designed by Loraine and Florence is that it started with a problem. A very simple problem that everyone can understand. This problem is that we were invited to the Wiels, a great Belgian art institution, in Brussels, to talk about a whole set of things put together under the title «Intersection of Care», and these things spoke of feminist practices of care, of decolonial gestures, minority voices, emancipation, etc… All those things that were invented, slowly, with a lot of fragility, on the fringes of the kind of place that the Wiels is (…)

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November 18th, 2020
Collective lecture – online
As part of the project « La veillée », Ateliers Médicis, Clichy-Montfermeil (FR)

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November 16th, 2020
Conference – online
Master fine Arts – Goldsmiths University – London (UK)

Flight towards a common ground
Drawing on my experiences in the scenes of contemporary art, cinema production and the comics publishing, I’d like to share a few thoughts-in-progress about subaltern’s representations in the current field of the visual arts. The question I’m considering at this particular time, when bodies and forms of minority lives have become the new exotic products of a capitalism in its death throes, is whether there exists an alternative to the exhaustion of these bodies on scenes of representation that they have not themselves created and on which they are yet lovingly invited to present themselves—as the young Black protester Jen Reid who raises a fist in Bristol in the collection of sculptures by the London artist Marc Quinn. If in my eyes we must refuse consent to toxic invitations that only serve as camouflage for the continuation of White privileges, that doesn’t yet mean we should refuse the idea of a site for alliances and commons. But we have to be able to take other paths to reach such places and perhaps take a few detours via other scenes to garner our forces and avoid arriving empty-handed on the scenes of the future where the re-composition of a World populated by both humans and non-humans will take place. It’s toward this place, which does not yet exist, that the works I wish to share in this intervention are oriented.

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Janvier / January 2020

January 24, 9:30am–7:30pm
Decolonizing Circumstances.
Practices and Sensibilities of Small-Scale Institutions and Art Spaces”
University of Cologne
While the debate on restitution and other decolonizing practices of museums is getting a lot of public attention, this international conference is shifting focus to small-scale institutions and art spaces and their specific decolonizing practices and sensibilities.

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University of Cologne
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Cologne – Germany
More about the event
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Octobre 2019

7 – 11.10.19 :
Zones narratives. Comment les récits composent-ils des mondes ?

Dans une pluralité de pratiques activistes situées en art, dans la recherche, dans des actions de défenses territoriales, le terme narration semble aujourd’hui surgir de toutes parts, sous forme d’un appel : les situations contemporaines dans lesquelles nous sommes prises requerraient « de nouveaux récits ». Les raisons invoquées pour ces nouveaux récits sont nombreuses, tout comme le sont les formes, les significations et les modes de mise en œuvre qu’on leur prête. Cette réunion se constitue comme un ralentissement sur cette notion de narration, comme un ensemble de pistes pour complexifier le caractère parfois massif de cet appel aux récits ; il ne s’agira pas de définir la narration, encore moins d’en résorber la multiplicité et les sens divergents, mais de la faire hésiter en interrogeant les pratiques et les gestes qu’elle recouvre ainsi que les zones de son émergence.
-> Lecture / conférence « La république des sauvageons », recherches préparatoires pour le texte « Les Empires intérieurs » (A paraître dans la revue Tumultes, janvier 2020)
Lecture and talk « La république des sauvageons », ongoing researches for the text « Interior empires » (To be publish in revue Tumultes, january 2020)

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Université Libre de Bruxelles
École de Recherche Graphique – Bruxelles
More about the event
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Septembre / September 2019

28.09.19 – 2 pm
France as Black Space (Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada)
Or Gallery will host a conversation with Françoise Vergès (writer, activist, curator; Paris, France) and Olivier Marboeuf (writer, curator; Paris, France) as part of a series of multi-sited events called Bodies Borders Fields. Vergès and Marboeuf are prolific in their production of critical texts and other forms of artistic output examining the impact of French colonial institutions on both indigenous and migrant black and Arab populations. Here, they are invited to think about how French African and Caribbean cultures are not only present in France but a tool with which to produce and highlight black space.

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B236 E Pender St.
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1T7
More about the event
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Juin / June 2019

20.06.19 – 6pm to 8pm
Poetic lectures and talk
As part of Marie van Berchem’s residency at Bateauthèque (Utopiana, Geneva), we invited Olivier Marboeuf to share texts and ideas about places, bodies, landscapes.

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Bateauthèque – Utopiana
Chemin Mestrezat 7a, 1202 Genève Genève, Suisse
More about the event
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8.06.19
Seminar « Franz Fanon : Une émancipation créatrice »
Seminar proposed by Chiara Palermo
Lecture : Violence en temps de paix (Violence in peace time)
first draft of a new text about invisible violence

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La Colonie – Paris
128 rue Lafayette 75010 Paris (FR)
more about the event
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MAI / May 2019
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31.05.19
Poetic of Relations
Art Research Day about Edouard Glissant’s universe
Seminar proposed by Kristen Kreider
Lecture : Repetition, Dissonance, Accumulation: Edouard Glissant’s moving landscapes of language

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University of Goldsmiths
Deptford Seminar Room, Back Gate, Lewisham Southwark College,
1 Deptford Bridge, London, SE8 4HH
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AVRIL / APRIL 2019
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10,11,12.04.19
Seminar Geontopower: mapping the European scene of late liberalism criticism (Paris 1 Sorbonne / Columbia University)- Around Elisabeth Povinelli
at Columbia Global Centers – Paris, Reid Hall, Paris, 4 Rue de Chevreuse, 75006, Paris

10.03.19 at 7 pm:
Opening Lecture « Luke & Fwanswa » by Olivier Marboeuf (version 2)

11.03.19 at 2pm :
Talk by Olivier Marboeuf & Louis Henderson
Composition and decomposition of a toxic body-landscape : resistance, endurance and detours in the present-future of Haïti. About, Overtures, the film to come by The Living and The Dead Ensemble.
During a speech in 2018, the current president of the United States classified Haiti amongst his so called “shithole countries”. In doing so he made an image of this Caribbean island, the first independent black Republic in history, as an indistinct and undesirable space with a population (both at home and the diaspora) of pests. How can we respond to this epistemological violence in a way that doesn’t legitimise the right of certain people to name and disqualify, to choose the healthy bodies that get the privilege of gravitating around the inevitably white and desirable central body? How can we refuse this agenda? To flee this toxic confrontation, it is necessary to take another path, to construct an alternative history in which we refuse to go to the bedside of the dying king where toxicity is but an opaque and strategic crown. We must imagine the possibility of resistance, of the body that endures, of a contemporaneity that is expressed through the capacity to survive within the toxic legacies of colonial capitalism. This is the path taken by the Karrabing Film Collective in their cinematographic fable Mermaids, equally explored by Elizabeth Povinelli in her book Economies of Abandonment.
In Haiti the legacy of colonialism is at once material – the pollution of the coasts and the landscape – but also politico-economic, making chaos and debt into the keys of a governance in ruins. It is also cultural if we understand Haitian Creole as a language constructed from within colonial violence as much as with the remains of a deported African culture, thus refusing the fantasy of a return to a pure and pre-colonial spirit.
In the film Ouvertures by the Living and the Dead Ensemble, a group of young Haitian actors and poets recompose a history of a possible future in the toxic environment of the island today. Faced with a dominant history, that imposes its order and chronology of events, proposes its own narrators and expels the undesirables, the film refuses to take the same position: the revolutionary heroes are thus decomposed, and the singular narrator leaves its place to the cacophony of the choral voice as a way to speak and feel disorder. The film trembles and undoes time, through its double heritage of Édouard Glissant and the Haitian Spiralist poet Frankétienne.

MARS / MARCH 2019
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20.03.19 at 6.30 pm
Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers)
Aux nos ancêtres futur.es (To our futur ancestors)
Lecture with Ana Vaz

20/21.03.19
Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Tours
Seminar : Hiérarchies et politiques du vivant.
Regards croisés de l’art et des sciences humaines et sociales sur l’humanité et la bestialité

21.03.19 : D’un corps paysage / Olivier Marboeuf
En traversant des fragments de textes d’auteurs caribéens tels que Patrick Chamoiseau ou Frankétienne, Olivier Marboeuf explore la possibilité d’une identité paysage dont serait porteuse la poésie créole, espace où se diffracte la voix du narrateur, où la cacophonie et l’écho participent d’une manière chorale de dire. Le conteur créole dans le geste de la spirale ramasse les temps et peuple le présent des détails oubliés, laissés pour compte. Il rôde à la lisière de l’ombre redit une histoire peuplée de présences et de formes de vie. Il fabrique un cinéma de la sensation, un corps paysage.

FEVRIER / FEBRUARY 2019
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04.02.19
LUNDI SOIR : D’une matière dangereuse et autres textes
Lecture at Synesthésie (France – 93)

16.02.19
TO OUR FUTURE ANCESTORS
Lecture with Ana Vaz and Nuno da Luz (sound) at Sonic Acts (Amsterdam)

JANVIER / JANUARY 2019
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LOOMING CREOLE

12 janvier / January 12th (4 – 7 pm)
THE NEW ALPHABET / Haus der Kulturen der Welt – Berlin
Lecture « From a dangerous matter » as part of « Looming Creole » an installation-performance conceived by Filipa César

ECOLOGIES OF DARKNESS.
BUILDING GROUNDS ON SHIFTING SANDS

EXHIBITION
OPENING 10.01.2019 19:00
11.01.–26.01. 2019 Daily 14:00–19:00
WITH Hera Chan &  Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, Mandy El-Sayegh, Nilbar Güreş, Natasha Mendonca, Markues, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Pallavi Paul, Luiza Prado, Tabita Rezaire, Bahia Shehab, Sheida Suleimani, Ana Vaz, Helen Zeru,   Pamela Z
Colonial Neighbours will be in conversation with Sepideh Rahaa

INCANTATIONS 
25.01.–26.01.2019 
WITH Hera Chan, Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, Alexis Chan & Nhu Duong, Övül Durmuşoğlu, Jeannette Ehlers, Giovanna Esposito Yussif, Karina Griffith, Shuruq Harb, Juliana Huxtable, Olivier Marboeuf and Ana Vaz, Jota Mombaça, Valeria Montti Colque, Pallavi Paul, Luiza Prado, Sepideh Rahaa, Tara Transitory & Nguyễn Baly, Airi Triisberg, Mikey Woodbridge and Lucio Vidal.