People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible (…) its own repressive strategies and practices.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Independent art historian, cultural critic, photographer, polyglot lecturer and researcher.
My research work is positioned at the intersection of history, visual culture and postcolonial studies, questions identity and its hermeneutics from an interdisciplinary and dialogic perspective, beyond ethnicity and nationality.
I undertook field researches in Haiti (2014-2015) and Cuba (2013), focusing on the role of ritual as a counter-hegemonic historical subject; in Brazil (2012), exploring street life in the context of inequality and discrimination of post enslaved societies; in Senegal and Congo (2016-2018), investigating informal economy as a form of resistance.
The aim of my visual essays is to critically explore the contemporary lived experiences of the subaltern people, their praxis of living, thinking, knowing and doing; their agency at work and their intersubjective/reflexive gestures and thoughts as they are expressed towards subverting and resisting the material and symbolic neoliberal oppression.
I arrived at this project through the frustration of being educated in a eurocentric bourgeois curriculum that omitted the questions of class, race and colonialism.
My intellectual adventures, informed and envisioned by collaborative work across geographies and chronologies, epistemologies and practices with both Western, African and Caribbean scholars, artists, film–makers and thinkers of all kinds, call for a different set of methodologies and critical enquiry based on embodied, relational ways of knowing.
In order to overcome the dichotomy between academic/popular culture and education, I present and discuss my researches in a variety of environments (universities, communities, radio, tv, magazines: https://www.paris-iea.fr/en/events/regards-et-resistances-performances-archives-et-les-figurants-de-l-histoire-2/ https://www.adiac-congo.com/content/rencontre-internationale-dart-contemporain-les-participants-la-septieme-edition-sont-connus/ https://www.mixcloud.com/alexia-clorinda/listens/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpOIFXbpsPE).
)I believe strongly in Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual engaging with cultural possibilities of making as acts of reconfiguration and rebellion to oppose the trespass of neoliberalism, the indifference towards inequality and the frontiers of oppression present in education practice.