Archiver l'absence : deux pratiques artistiques face à la colonialité de l'histoire
Recently presented at KADIST as part of Diaspora at Home , Nidhal Chamekh and Fanny Souade Sow both deal with History, its gaps and its absences. In “Nos visages” (2019 – 2021), Nidhal Chamekh focuses particularly on those who do not make history – understood as a dominant national narrative – and strives through his drawing-centered practice, not to give the forgotten a name, but to actualize the violence of the historical tearing that the French colonial empire started, continued and later ratified. For Chamekh, it is not a matter of repairing a posteriori absence with a presence, of countering anonymity through celebration, but of accentuating these absences and archiving them as such. As for Fanny Souade Sow, she works to create an archive where there is none, as in her project about October 17th, 1961 – a murderous repression by the French police of a demonstration of Algerians organized in Paris by the National Liberation Front (FLN). Invited by artists, families, communities or art centers to work on this memorial absence, Fanny Souade Sow proposes memorial plaques that speak of the very silence surrounding this massacre in French historiography, and in the imaginary that a unified national narrative tries to convey. Where does this “archival impulse” come from and how does it integrate their works? What does it interrogate, not only in the past, but in the very future of History, of the narratives that remain to be told? This discussion will be moderated by Hajer Ben Boubaker, independent researcher and sound documentarian. Participants’ bios : Hajer Ben Boubaker is an independent researcher, specializing in Arab music and the cultural history of North African immigration in France. She is the creator of the podcast Vintage Arab which approaches Arab music from a socio-historical perspective. She is a producer for France Culture and has directed the documentary “Une histoire du mouvement des travailleurs arabes” dedicated to the struggles of immigration in the 1970s. She collaborates with various media and cultural institutions. Born in 1985 in Dahmani (Tunisia), Nidhal Chamekh lives and works between Paris (France) and Tunis. Nidhal Chamekh studied at the School of Fine Arts of Tunis and at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. In his work, Chamekh investigates history as a point of access to our contemporary times. Drawing on both biography and politics, his work takes the forms of drawing, installation, photography and videos. Sampling the chaos of history and developing cross-sections to this chaos, his work constitutes a kind of social and cultural archaeology that renders the historical complexity of images perceptible. Chamekh’s work has been exhibited at the MAC Lyon for “Comme un parfum d’aventure” (2020), the Dream City Biennial Tunis (2019) and the Modern Art Oxford for “A Slice Through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings” (2018). In 2021 – 2022, he is a resident at the Villa Medicis in Rome, Italy. Fanny Souade Sow was born in 1994 in Versailles. She graduated from the Ecole supérieure d’art et de design de Grenoble – Valence in 2020 and lives and works in the Paris region. Fanny Souade Sow’s work is inhabited by socio-political and historical questions. Whether in the form of editions, sculptures, performances or through the medium of video, she questions the effects of colonial heritage on racialized bodies. While her works reflect systemic and violent mechanisms of oppression, they also participate in the writing of a collective memory. Her work has recently been exhibited in group shows, notably at MAC VAL – Vitry-sur-Seine (2019), the Royal Academy of Brussels (2020), FRAC Franche-Comté – Besançon and KADIST, Paris (2021) and at the Eric Dupont gallery (2022). In January 2022, she had her first solo show at RECYCLART – Brussels. She is currently in residence at CAC Brétigny and accompanied by the curator Daisy Lambert. In March and April 2022, she is in residence at SAW gallery in Ottawa, Canada.