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Nos Chers Objets – 2023
The French and The Germans 2012
In 2012, for the 50th anniversary of the Alliance Française Treaty, I was asked to do an exhibition at the Landdrostei, a large manor house in Hamburg. I chose a small room normally closed to the public where there were musical instruments and a stopped grandfather clock. This setting became an imaginary music room for expatriates. Between the two large windows and opposite the nine photos on display, a monochrome ebony detail, framed under glass, served as a mirror. It reflected the visitor’s portrait, and a dialogue could be established between one’s own face and the sculptures. For a moment the visitor became one of the exhibited objects and a part of the exhibition (included), while being confronted with history (excluded). An empty score was placed on the stringed instrument, allowing visitors to imagine their own music. The series of ten photos is framed in mahogany wood reminiscent of the period of colonisation. Each picture has a different passe-partout, reflecting a history of picture-hanging in different spaces (homes, galleries or museums), like an early polaroid, a picture, a painting or a book. One photo is without passe-partout, filling the space within the frame, completely abstract, the opposite of the completely figurative others. The subjects are photographed in different positions or sizes, such as a portrait close-up or wide shot. At first, we don’t know what it is. We see men, old and young, strong and weak. Unfocused, they have lost their identity as an object and open the visitors’ minds to the question of what they are seeing. Are they real? We don’t know, some of them may be, some of them are like sculptures. All of them are conflictual objects, visibles and invisibles talking about colonialism, slavery, persecution, discrimination, exclusion, rejection. In two of the them we see a male face, suffering. This is a letter-opener from 1914, manufactured by Bergmann in Vienna. What we don’t see is the rest of the object: a crocodile’s mouth swallowing the Black person. Another is a Belgian sculpture, called The Child from Congo, 1914, and the last one is an advertising object from a tobacco company in Hamburg, 1920.
Today the Colonialism topic is much more present and has become Post-Colonialism. In 2023, at the Centre Culturel Français in Freiburg, Germany, I decided to complete the 2012 Series, and Les Français et les Allemands became Nos Chers Objets Our beloved Objects, this time with photos of ordinary objects which had emotional value during my childhood or my studies: Caroline, my first beloved doll, the first Black doll in France from the Bella factory; carved wooden salad servers; Auntie Anne’s leopard-skin hat, Leonore’s ivory bracelet, both of which I don’t really know how to deal with; a German sweet Negerküsse now called Schokoküsse; my daughter’s Black rag doll; an African sculpture of a white Belgian soldier; the front page from the book Blaise Cendrars’ Anthology of Negritude, and a burnt book found in the street.
I’ve added notes and quotes written on recycled paper: tributes and questions that are on my mind and to which I haven’t yet found an answer; songs by Patty Smith and Kendrik Lamar; “Savor“, an extract from the Petit traité du racisme en Amérique (Short treatise on racism in America) by Dany Laferrièrre etc.
I took away all the glass from the frames and recycled cardboard trays used for red fruit or tomatoes to frame the new photos. These paper sleeves, like cardboard packaging, are generally objects that you don’t see and that you throw away once they’ve been used. In 2021, there was a paper shortage due to the global health crisis. I found it important to underline this by giving them a second life.