Des algues pour racines

2021

Performance and audiovisual installation, 23 min

Juliette Gampert, the second artist invited to HitStories, explores the concept of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic through a soundtrack punctuated by visual appearances of videos. Bringing together several stories, both personal and fictional, she questions the way in which beliefs and divinities linked to the archetype of water evolve within the African and Caribbean diaspora. The ocean becomes a place of memory, of scattered, hybrid and fluid identities, a place of sacred energy that is expressed through the bodies by the different cultural forms to which the history of the Atlantic has given rise. The installation that accompanies this soundtrack at HIT immerses the spectators in a universe evoking Ọ̀ṣunality,* or marooning, inspired by visits to caves and waterfalls in Jamaica such as the Reach Falls, which have marked her memory.

*Ọ̀ṣunality is a sex-positive and African-centered paradigm coined by Nkiru Nzegwu in 2010 in support of postcolonial and non-phallocentric views of sex.

®Eden Leviam