16 April 2024
Museum of Breath
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Museum of Breath collaborator Olivier Marboeuf (born 1971 in Guadeloupe) is a multifaceted French-Caribbean storyteller, curator, researcher, and film producer. Cofounder of Frémok and former artistic director of Espace Khiasma, he contributed to the integration of postcolonial discourse into the French art scene, notably in his essay “Suites Décoloniales: s’enfuir de la plantation [decolonial sequels: escaping from the plantation.].” His work spans writing, drawing, film production, and pedagogy, underpinning his commitment to minority representations and decolonial thought.
For When Solidarity Is Not a Metaphor, Museum of Breath presents A Liquid Monument (2024), which is a mural which unfolds in parallel to the exhibition, accompanied by sound recordings by R22-Tout Monde.
Museum of Breath collaborator Olivier Marboeuf’s A Liquid Monument challenges the romantic Western view of the sea, metamorphosising it into a canvas of historical and current conflicts. This chalk-on-ultramarine-blue mural reveals the sea as a site of necropolitics and economic conflict intertwined with the legacies of the Middle Passage of the Slave Trade, the struggles and debts of the Caribbean with the deaths of the Mediterranean, forging an ephemeral monument to Afro and trans-Caribbean solidarity.
Marboeuf’s work ]transcends metaphors to challenge dominant cultural narratives and unveil concealed histories of economic and military exploitation. This work is the blueprint of the Museum of Breath—a long-term project that imagines minoritary practices of the archive through a series of repetitions and rehearsals of past struggles from the perspective of abolitionist actions. It is presented here with sound recordings which bring together multiple voices recorded in various places, situations and contexts for the webradio R22 Tout-Monde.
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