Olivier Marboeuf, Bleu Pays
Presented within the exhibition Not Fully Human, Not Human at All at KADIST Paris, Bleu Pays [ Blue Land ] is a poem which takes the form of an explosion, an explosion that will occur to make and to maintain a space. A place, a refuge for those who have lived too long as silent witnesses and whose song begins in the remains, in the rubble of History like a resumption of scattered traces. Our history is that sound that repeats itself and we have chosen to call it poetry. And we chose to call it cinema. Showed at the Not Fully Human, Not Human at All exhibition at KADIST Paris, Olivier Marboeuf’s drawings compose a graphic and hallucinatory score produced under the influence of a living island. It is the island of the text Bleu Pays [ Blue Land ] that Olivier Marboeuf and the artist Eden Tinto Collins will read in two voices. A first step of another becoming of this poem, this reading will be followed by a conversation with Lotte Arndt, theorist and teacher who translated the poem into German, Natasa Petrešin-Bachelez, curator of the exhibition and Emilie Villez, director of KADIST. During this live program on the R22 Tout-Monde radio platform, we will talk about positions of enunciation and forms of living things, of poetry as theory and of translation as a space for a critical community. FSL (French Sign Language) translation will occur simultaneously, live on Instagram . Olivier Marboeuf is an author, drawer, performance artist and film producer. In the 90s, he set up the Amok (now Frémok) publishing house, for comics and research, and Espace Khiasma, an independent art center that he managed in Les Lilas, on the outskirts of Paris, from 2004 to 2018. His work is now divided between theoretical and fiction writings about the representation of minority bodies and places, drawing and film production at Spectre Productions. Most of his texts are available on the blog, Toujours Debout . Eden Tinto Collins developed her practice of fine arts through the National School of Fine Arts of Paris Cergy and during her internship in Ghana in the structure directed by Bibie Brew at the New Morning. Poetician and hyper-media artist, she explores in a horizontal wave of collaborations the notions of interdependency, f.r.ictions between melancholia, mythology and post/trans/cyber/humanity. Her language is imaginal as she creates moments of care, staged and set through music, activated by re-enactment. She appears in several groups and projects such as Black(s)tothefuture, the Gystère Live Gang, Yoke Collectif, She is also creating a project, mixing poetry, net-art, in situ performance and space opera, Numin, based on her first book, Bonne arrivée ou la Numination published in May 2021 in the Fresh Fiction collection. Writer and curator Lotte Arndt (Paris, France) accompanies the work of artists who critically interrogate the postcolonial present and the blind spots of modernity. She lectures at École supérieure d’art et design Valence. She publishes on artistic strategies that aim to subvert Eurocentric narratives and institutions, and co-organizes cultural programs, screenings and discussions in artistic and academic spaces. Her current research focuses on toxic conservation and its discontents. She is co-founder of Troubles dans les collections , an online journal dedicated to (post-)ethnographic collections in African and European museums, and works with the artist’s collective On-Trade-Off on transnational artistic strategies countering extractivism. She co-curated Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes (2019, with S. Rudolph) at Museumspavillon, Salzburg ; Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (with L. Morin, Bétonsalon, Paris 2017 ; Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, 2018). Her publications include Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (with Yesomi Umolu, Chicago University Press, 2019); Magazines Do Culture ! Postcolonial Negotiations in Paris Based Periodicals Relating to Africa , WVT, 2016; Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect (with Mathieu K. Abonnenc and Catalina Lozano), B42, 2016 ; Hunting & Collecting. Sammy Baloji (with Asger Taiaksev), MuZEE, Galerie Imane Farès, 2016.