One of the more striking images in the video Toli Toli is that of hands underwater, fingers moving as if weaving. Later, these same hands are seen making weaving motions in the air. Hands, weaving without material, weaving no matter what, weaving just because, might serve as a metaphor for the artist’s interest in making work out of her experience of silences in postcolonial Guadeloupe.
The artist interrogates the effects of colonialism on language, landscape, and identity through installations that are fragmentary, ephemeral, intimate, and sensitive to location. In Spelling (2016) at Signal in Malmö, Sweden, viewers wander among disintegrating banana leaves, broken clay vessels, and slowly dripping water. The drips, like the tick of a clock, allude to the centuries-long impact of chlordecone, a pesticide once used on banana plantations. The video Blue Spelling, included in the installation, is a sequence of chalkboard drawings that takes as its starting point a profile of the artist’s head and torso. Lines accumulate, fissure, dissolve, continuously morph, and regroup around and over the female body, a drawing in motion.
In this interview, Biabiany talks about the legacy of colonialism in Guadeloupe, her interest in materiality and language, and the challenge of taking silence as subject matter.
How has growing up in Guadeloupe informed your art practice?
My work is situated in Guadeloupe, and Guadeloupe still belongs to France. Relations with the land, with forests, with plants, with medicinal knowledge—all of this is greatly impacted by assimilation of the French system. What we know about where we live—Guadeloupe, but also the Caribbean—is very little. History has been transformed in one sense, and only one sense, with only one gaze, that of France. Narrative, the way to understand where we are, passes through the filter of French control, and there is a lot of silence in Guadeloupe around this situation. Discussions about independence are quickly ridiculed—even if the discourse is quite interesting. The space for that discourse to exist is not impossible, but it is complicated.
Living in Mexico City, I became immersed in an activist artist scene. When I returned to Guadeloupe—I now divide my time between there and Mexico City—I found the situation passive, frozen. I was surprised by the silence. I wanted to talk about that silence in my work.
In Mexico, and in many cultures, there’s a connection between weaving and storytelling. This has fascinated me for many years, even before I started making art. I was like, okay, I’m in Guadeloupe, what are the traditions here that could help me explore the transformation of history into story, and story into matter?
I began to investigate the technique used to make fish traps. I learned about bamboo, when to cut it, why, the moon cycle, the territories, where to go. It was a long process for me to be able to produce the bamboo sculptures for Toli Toli. The idea was that, as spectators moved about the installation, light passed through the bamboo and projected shadows onto their bodies. The installation’s video included flashes of color, and there was an interplay between video and sculptures, between what was projected and what was reflected on the bodies. I thought of the video as a weaving, too, in the sense of how I organized voice, images, and sentences.
Fascinating to think of the video object as a weaving.
It’s been the starting point of the editing process. The video Toli Toli is one of a series of three. The series explores different aspects of one’s relationship to the land—political, ecological, medicinal, and so on—and all are weavings of image, voice, and text.
In the videos, I always use Creole and add English or French depending on where I am exhibiting. In Guadeloupe, Creole is present but not recognized as an official language. It’s an everyday language connected with the emotions and political claims; you learn Creole from grandparents and parents—it occupies some spaces of life but never the intellectual space due to French assimilation, to the tension between French and Creole. There is still a class judgment based on who speaks what.
You have made work about the relationship of language and the body, especially the female body. For example, the installation SiEntaXis, in Mexico City, has been described, by you, as emerging out of the “lexicons of sexuality.” The installation consists of sentences scratched onto the walls, and you have referred to the space itself as “a body looking at its own components, going from the sentences involving body to a penetration and violence in the space itself.” Can you talk about this aspect of your work, the interest in how language shapes perceptions of the body?
When I arrived in Mexico City, I became super aware of the language game of expressions. I observed how, in Mexican Spanish, machismo is integrated in everyday life and language, and how this impacts relationships.
I took the space of Crater Invertido, an artist and activist space in Mexico City, and I wrote sentences on the wall. Some were quotes, some were my own lines, and some were just language games, but they all were pointing out how the language is super macho.
The sentences were in Spanish?
There were sentences in Creole, in Spanish, and in English.
The walls were white, but under the white was blue, and under the blue was red. It was an old house, an art space, and the walls had been painted many times. With the humidity, the paint was already fugile, moisty, and I immediately saw colors beneath the white walls. I sanded parts of the wall to make those layers visible. The writing, scratched into the walls, functioned as a kind of wound, but also as a hole. Yes, the experience was to have all those sentences everywhere in that space, to have that humidity, to have that skin-like moment. A very simple wood structure guided the spectators through the space.
You close your video Blue Spelling—a chalk drawing in motion—with the sentence “A change of perspective is a change of temporality.” Can you say more about this statement?
The sentence is from William Kentridge’s Six Drawing Lessons. I took it out of context. I was thinking about how Caribbean history is built. Caribbean intellectuals such as Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott talk about Caribbean history as a history of ruptures, so fragmented that it is not possible to represent it with a horizontal line. This was a starting point.
The drawing was done during a residency at Malmö. I had arrived in Sweden at the moment the right-wing extremists were loudly protesting in the streets. It was strange to arrive in Sweden in this context, and I was afraid. I saw that the media representation of this political moment included a negative representation of the black community in Sweden, and I started to think about how the representation of myself is structured. This drawing started as an exploration of that question. The idea of time is this line that is moving all the time, building the space, building the image, moving through different periods—getting diffracted like a dash.
Is Blue Spelling a standalone work, or part of an installation?
Spelling was the name of the installation, shown at Signal during the last month of my residency. The idea of “spelling” had to do with letters and words, but I was also talking about chlordecone, an insecticide that has contaminated the soil of Guadeloupe. A huge ecological problem that will persist for centuries. I wanted to address the implications of chlordecone but in a subtle way. I didn’t want to say “chlordecone” out loud. I used banana leaves—chlordecone was used on banana plantations—and broken clay pots, and I had water drip into a large vase. I wanted something flowing very, very slowly. The dripping was like a clock. Chlordecone has invaded the rivers, and it will stay in the soil for centuries.
Blue Spelling was one of the videos in the installation. The videos were moving blackboards that played with letters, territory shapes, like drawing games with letters appearing and disappearing.
Although conceptually complex, your materials and objects inhabit space in a gentle way— they are barely there.
Yes, this has been a strategy from the very beginning when making installations: working with details, you want to get close, and give the impression that materials are fragile, so you pay attention to the body in a different way than you would if you felt there was no risk to the objects. It’s been an exploration. For example, last year I made large drawings in soil so, of course, people were afraid of destroying them even though the room was huge (j'ai tué le papillon dans mon oreille in le Magasin des Horizons, Grenoble, France). Last year, I worked with thread (qui vivra verra, qui mourra saura at CRAC Alsace). I am interested in how consciousness of the body changes when encountering fragile materials. Some feel the need to go slow. Some are scared their bodies will destroy the art. It depends on the person, but it’s an experience and situation I want to continue to explore.
