Limbé

2021 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

10:00 minutes (looped)

Mathieu Abonnenc

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The film Limbé by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes its inspiration and its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-creator of the negritude movement. This Creole expression, which activates the Limbo dance through language, evokes a great sadness, linked to the death of the artist’s sister. This silent film continues Abonnenc’s collaboration with dancer and choreographer Betty Tchomanga, who played the protagonist in his film Secteur IXB (2015). In Limbé Abonnenc attempts to give form to a state of deep melancholy, while echoing the reflections of Guyanese poet Wilson Harris, for whom the Limbo dance is a way of evoking, through its contortions, the gestures that slaves had to invent to survive crossing the Atlantic ocean in the hull of slave ships. It is said that the Limbo was born on slave ships during the Middle Passage; there was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders. In the film, the black body appears and reappears progressively in the darkness, obliging the spectator to adjust their sight in order to apprehend what is happening before their eyes.

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Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s practice engages with the cultural hegemonies that form the basis for the evolution of contemporary society. Abonnenc uses video, photography, installation, drawing, and exhibition projects to raise questions about imperial histories and their effects on the former colonies of developed countries. Examining the role of images and representations in the construction of these histories and the identities that result from it, the artist interprets and translates these sources. Kleyebe Abonnenc’s work grapples with why certain things are lost and how to make them exist again. The artist confronts the persistence of politically and culturally charged images in order to replace them with others, and by refusing to show terror while making it palpable, his work reflects on the means of “decolonizing culture”.

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Colors:

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• monochrome