Exposition : Monika Emmanuelle Kazi au Centre culturel suisse

Centre culturel suisse Paris

The places we inhabit often continue to inhabit us. The practice of Monika Emmanuelle Kazi brings back to life domestic spaces and family memories nourished by a diasporic experience between Pointe-Noire in République du Congo, where she grew up, and Paris. SAT 19.09: Opening Radio Nova invites the public to continue the evening on the CCS stage with two concerts. Free entry from 20:00 + With terrain meuble, the artist transforms the CCS into an architecture traversed by memories. A structure of mobile display panels occupies the space. The walls become surfaces of projection where family narratives, traces of childhood and broader stories linked to colonial legacies, economic exchanges and the flows of materials and raw resources come to the surface. At the heart of the project lies a particular attention to building materials and to what they tell. Cement, introduced on the African continent during the colonial period to build "in hard materials," progressively replaced vernacular materials better suited to local climates. By hindering the natural circulation of air and humidity, it lets condensation and halos appear on the walls, which Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reinterprets as drawings or crystallizations of memory. Conversely, tropical woods exported to Europe reappear in her works in the form of marquetry, revealing other circulations of materials, values and histories. The title terrain meuble evokes at once the mobility, instability and dampness of a ground in perpetual transformation, inscribing her mobile-furniture installation within this same ecosystem. Composed of mobile wooden panels, it is traversed by details, traces and strata of memory. By perforating the display panels, the artist reveals their skeleton and lets sand flow through the interstices. Pyrography, sapele (Congo mahogany) marquetry and fragments of wallpaper inscribe intimate and transcontinental narratives within this shifting architecture.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗