Archive Bouba Touré Diane Cescutti Gwladys Gambie Myriam Omar Awadi Ludgi Savon Mawena Yehouessi Musée du souffle Disobedient Matter

Bouba Touré (1948-2022) lived in Paris and Somankidi Coura, Mali. He moved to France in 1965. He later studied at the University of Vincennes and became a projectionist in a Paris cinema. A photographer since the 1970s, he documented the lives and struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and Mali. In the 1980s, Touré exhibited his work and gave lectures. His photographic work was presented at Rencontres de Bamako 2019 and at the Hamburg Triennial of Photography 2022. From 2006, Touré and Raphaël Grisey worked together on collaborative projects including “Semer Somankidi Coura, une archive générative”. Their feature film Xarassi Xanne won several awards in 2022 at the Cinéma du Réel festival, the Tarifa African Film Festival, Monde en vues and Archivio Aperto. 

Diane Cescutti is a French transmedia artist. She lives and works in Saint Etienne. She graduated from the Ecole supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Fine Arts in 2019 and 2021 respectively. She also studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts and the University of Houston in the United States. In 2021-2022, she was part of the Art post-graduate program at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Her practice takes as its starting point the loom, which is at the origin of computer programming. Using a plastic, speculative and narrative approach, she considers the augmented potential of weaving, exploring the shared genealogies between the history of weaving and textiles, and the history of computers and technology. She develops a multi-faceted production that brings together weaving and sculpture to question our relationship with technology.

Gwladys Gambie was born in Fort de France and lives and works in Martinique. Graduated from DNSEP (Master) in 2014. Gwladys’ work explores her own body and revolves around the character Manman Chadwon (manam urchin), a kind of fictional deity created by the artist. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, embroidery and costume-making, the artist works with organic, corporeal forms. Gwladys has completed a series of residencies in Guadeloupe, Aruba and Miami (2019), as well as a recent residency in the Catapult program for the Caribbean. She is also a laureate of the ONDES 2020 residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris. She has taken part in the international exhibitions Désir Cannibale at the Little Haïti Cultural Centre in Miami, as part of the Festival Tout Monde (2019), and the Mercosur on-line biennial (2020), among others.

Myriam Omar Awadi lives and works in Île de la Réunion, in France. Embroidering, making and unmaking, as well as doing nothing, are the kinds of “non-acts” or “counter-acts” that make up her work. Through writing, drawing, image or performance, the artist weaves the fabric of ordinary romances “of which only frills remain in the end”. Her work questions ways of inhabiting the void and dismantling the spectacle, knocking down what fascinates to return to what bites, and to attack the world… with a love song. 

Ludgi Savon is a visual artist from Martinique. In his work, he explores a phantasmagorical universe using graphic and pictorial practices such as drawing, watercolor painting, assemblage, sewing and embroidery, as well as digital arts, studio and digital photography, digital art on smartphone and tablet, video and performance. His multi-faceted work is both poetic and humorous. He stages his body as if in a process of re-presentation in which, subject or object, it embodies an invisible universe.

Mawena Yehouessi (aka M/Y) was born in 1990 in Cotonou, Benin. M/Y is a collisionist: curator, researcher and artist. Founder of the Black(s) to the Future collective and currently a doctoral student at Villa Arson + Université Côte d’Azur, she lives and works between Paris and Nice. Interested in alter-futurisms and poetic realities, she develops an imploratory, rather than exploratory, collaborative and forward-looking practice of collage. Her mediums range from visual/digital syncretism to film-making, poetry-writing, translation, pedagogy, concept development, collective gathering, study, improvised dance, party-organizing and exhibition-organizing.

In 2019, Olivier Marboeuf began imagining the project for a musée du souffle (museum of breath), at the invitation of Emmanuelle Chérel, as part of the project she was developing with El Hadji Malick Ndiaye around the site and collection of the Musée Théodore Monod in Dakar. This oral museum would speak from Senegal’s turbulent present, but would also conjure up past and future apparitions that inhabited the material of places and bodies. Bodies that decided to set themselves in motion, to give place, to offer hospitality to secret archives. The songs shared here are the beginnings of a quest to produce an experimental space for citizen discourse, based on the idea of the concert as a popular archive.

Olivier Marboeuf is a storyteller, curator and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the 1990s, he and French-Beninese author Yvan Alagbé founded éditions Amok (now Frémok), a publishing house for research comics, followed by Espace Khiasma, a center for visual art and living literature (2004 to 2018) dedicated to minority representations, helping to introduce postcolonial theories to the French art scene. He currently divides his work between speculative writing, drawing and film production with Spectre Productions. For the academic year 2023/2024, he is the recipient of the Banister Fletcher Fellowship at the University Institute of London in Paris (ULIP), where he is developing research around the archive of Caribbean diasporic presences in Paris and London. He recently published the essay Suites Décoloniales: s’enfuir de la plantation and the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, both published by éditions du commun.