• Euridice Zaituna Kala
  • Artistic committee 2019
  • ADAGP - Villa Vassilieff Grant

    • Euridice Zaituna Kala

    Euridice Zaituna Kala is a Paris based mozam­bican artist. Through her work, she is inter­ested in cul­tural and his­tor­ical meta­mor­phosis and its manip­u­la­tions and adap­ta­tions. The artist seeks to shine a light on the mul­ti­plicity of his­tor­ical periods and social rela­tions within Africa, keeping this con­ti­nent as a cen­tral per­spec­tive, as it is essen­tial to her reflec­tions. These nar­ra­tives take place in areas of depar­ture and encoun­ters… taking shape through instal­la­tions, per­for­mances, images and books.

    She was trained in Photography at the Johannesburg Market Photo Workshop (MPW-2012). She pre­sented sev­eral per­for­mances, including Mackandal Turns into a Butterfly: a love potion, La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec (2018) and Euridice Kala Shows and Doesn’t Tell, gale­rie Saint-Séverin, Paris (2018). She also took part in numerous group shows, namely: the 14th Fellbach Triennial for Small Sculpture: 40,000 – A Museum of Curiosity (2019), Le pou­voir du dedans, La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Mistake ! Mistake ! Said the Rooster… and step­ped down from the Duck, Lumiar Cité, Lisbonne (2017), Infecting the City, Cape Town (2017) et (Co)Habitar, Casa da America Latina, Lisbonne (2017). She was nom­i­nated at the SAM Art Projects Prize (2018) and the Contemporary talent Prize of the Fondation François Schneider (2018). Her work is also included in the 2nd edi­tion of the Lagos Biennal (2019), Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019 -2020), and in the 1st edi­tion of the Triennale of Stellenbosh (2020).
    She is also the founder and co-orga­nizer of e.a.s.t. (Ephemeral Archival Station), a lab­o­ra­tory and plat­form for long term artistic research pro­jects, cre­ated in 2017.

    Euridice Zaituna Kala ©Teo Betin 2018

    The artistic pro­ject : ARCHIVE FRAGILE

    It’s been three years since I arrived in France. Three years during which I saw a lot of changes, both per­sonal and soci­etal. I wit­nessed the voting of the Brexit, the Trump elec­tion, I got mar­ried, gave birth to my son, spent time in the offices of the Val-de-Marne pre­fec­ture, watched Emmanuel Macron’s assump­tion of power and the losses of Bowie and Prince. I was here when Beyoncé’s Lemonade came out, when #Metoo and the Gilets Jaunes emerged… Three years of events shaping, in their con­texts, a col­lec­tive story that we share every minute from our vir­tual avatars. We have never been so close to the daily news that we share as to our extraor­di­nary, yet ordi­nary indi­vidual events. ARCHIVE FRAGILE is equally an artistic pro­ject and a social exper­i­ment. It is a journey through time, proposing to put our­selves in the future to watch the past and rel­a­tivize our wor­ries about the pre­sent. With this pro­ject, I want to con­ceive a inter­ac­tive dig­ital plat­form that will lean on social net­works (notably Instagram) in order to reflect to porosity and the weak­ness of our vir­tual col­lec­tive memory. Taking the Marc Vaux archives as a starting point, this col­lec­tion of images that draws the out­lines of the XXth Century Montparnasse, I want to reflect upon its appari­tion con­texts, mix it with my own archives, explore its oper­a­tion. I will also explore the images traces and short­ages, looking at his­tory with a both fic­tional and real deci­phering pro­cess, mixing the lan­guages of arche­ology and visual anthro­pology.

    Euridice Zaituna Kala, (Tedet) Telling time - from COMPOUND to CITY (2014), Performance, Johannesburg © Akona Kenqu, Public Acts, © ADAGP, Paris, 2019