Musa
2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
3:19 minutes
Minia Biabiany
Musa is a visual and textual work by Minia Biabiany and the starting point of a broader research around the sexuality of Caribbean women, the historical legacy of slavery, and the artist’s own female lineage. Sometimes shown within an installation, sometimes on its own, the video combines images of flowers, landscapes, and bodies, with text in Creole and English. The video is conceived as a weaving, its technique creating stitchings and surfaces, upon which the artist inscribes stories. The words, the voice, and the images are written simultaneously, so together they form both a poem and a question. The featured flowers are those of the banana tree, from which the work takes its name: musa . Believed to possess healing properties for the womb when cooked and consumed, they are now a symbol of contamination as they were infected by chlordecone, a pesticide used between 1972 and 1993 in Martinique and Guadeloupe, with harmful effects on sexual organs. Touching, cutting, peeling and bathing the plants, bodies make their appearance in the film: hands and bellies that belong to the women in the artist’s family (her sister, her mother, herself). Their presence, crucial to the making of these images, reveal the manifold roles of the female body that carry individual and collective memory; bearing the weight of genealogy and history, but also serving as a site and tool for healing. And so is Musa , of which words and gestures are as much reminders of the past as medicine for the future.
Minia Biabiany’s practice is concerned with the past and ongoing effects of colonialism, exploring the poetics of resistance embedded in everyday life practices, and translating this research into the exhibition space through careful consideration of the cultural and spiritual implications of the material she uses, and the techniques she employs. She is interested in the specificities of the Caribbean and the complex cultural interactions that circulate in and around it. More recently, her work also approaches healing and sexuality and their potential for liberation in a feminist sense. In 2016, she initiated the pedagogical and artistic project Semillero Caribe [Caribbean Seedbed]: an experimental seminar based on exercises with the body and drawing engaging with concepts of Caribbean thinkers.
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