In order to inaugurate and conclude the Palais de Tokyo’s summer season, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien presents an eponymous and original performance during the first and last weekend of her exhibition “L’être, l’autre et l’entre” [Being, Otherness and Between]. On this occasion, she proposes to invest the large rotunda, central location of the building. 

The space becomes one of a living narrative, where the artist, accompanied by performers, reads her poems like a griotte or storyteller, mobilising her body and her voice with a specific sound creation. In a ritual-like form that interlaces words and materials, combining text, textiles and various artefacts, this project questions the bonds that human beings cultivate with their environment and with the living world as a whole.

Borrowing from western pop culture, West African animist traditions, the matriarchal Akan culture of Ivory Coast and the creole culture of Guadeloupe, as well as iconography from other parts of the world, the French artist with a mulifaceted identity imagines syncretic combinations of various elements to explore their symbolism, bearing ancestral knowledge.