In the frame of the exhibition ‘‘Ubuntu, a lucid dream’’, the Palais de Tokyo gives Carte blanche to Chris Cyrille-Isaac (poet, art critic and curator) and Sarah Matia Pasqualetti (PhD student in Aesthetics). 

 

Employed by philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne to mean “making humanity together”, the term Ubuntu suggests the notion of interdependence, of a humanity that weaves and constructs links between living beings, just like the project Mangrovité by Chris Cyrille-Isaac and Sarah Matia Pasqualetti. They pursue this idea through a session conceived in dialogue with the exhibition Ubuntu, a lucid dream and as a means of reflecting upon different forms of Relation.

À partir de (dé-partir et se départir de) Édouard Glissant. We would probably be wrong to think in terms of a system of filiation to describe our relationship to the Glissantian island. To begin with it is not to take as a starting point an origin or an unchanged whole (and even less a father…) but a trace that is always replayed for ourselves, by ourselves, to get away from the ghosts and vampires who fantasize filiations and make thought a private property. This is what we have been doing since the exhibition « — Mais le monde est une mangrovité » in which we were already trying to create our own images and concepts.

The aim of this event? To explode – in politics, poetry and aesthetics – the totalité-roche that is the concept of Relation (so close to this idea of Ubuntu) from the Trembling Lands (Reunion, Mayotte, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti). In this  encounter, The relations will succeed, probably fail, and will be conceived as experiments, where the edges of the continent and the ruined beaches of the islands meet. We propose interventions and performances to endlessly vary around the Roche du Diamant and to depart from it like a flight of birds that, dazzling, trace the future towards a mangrovité, and that, on their way back to the Roche, sing : « Nou ka vin apwé Glissant… ».

The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, presented for the first time in France, is a project by the artist Kudzanai Chiurai. The extensive collection of archives, mostly sound, on view in this library constitutes the soundtrack of the struggles for civil rights and liberation movements in the global south. This space of hospitality, considered a liberated zone, regularly hosts DJ-sets and a series of sessions that intersect speech, poetry, performance and music, focusing on practices and imaginaries in resistance.