I, the Archive - Euridice Zaituna Kala

Ending - From December 15 to 20, the exhi­bi­tion I, the Archive by Euridice Zaituna Kala will be open to the public for one last time before its dis­man­tling. We hope to meet many of you to dis­cover or redis­cover her work, and are happy to wel­come you during this week, which will unfor­tu­nately mark the con­clu­sion of the pro­ject car­ried out by Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research at the Villa Vassilieff, which will close its doors defini­tively after the closing of the exhi­bi­tion.

Euridice Zaituna Kala, I, the archive, Villa Vassilieff, 2020.

Exhibition from 09.19 to 12.20.2020
On a pro­posal by Mélanie Bouteloup
Curated by Camille Chenais

In September 2020, the artist Euridice Zaituna Kala takes over the space of the Villa Vassilieff with the exhi­bi­tion I, the Archive, pre­senting a nar­ra­tive and sen­si­tive re-reading of the Marc Vaux archive, on which the artist worked as part of the ADAGP - Villa Vassilieff grant. Through a mental and audio journey, the exhi­bi­tion mixes the artist’s own mem­o­ries and ref­er­ences with reflec­tions on the archives them­selves, their fragility, their porosity, and their lacks. By including sin­gular indi­vid­u­al­i­ties in these archives, Euridice Zaituna Kala reclaims the writing of his­tory and shows, through the inter­weaving of these des­tinies, that another shared and col­lec­tive his­tory is pos­sible.

Download the Press release

Euridice Zaituna Kala’s pro­ject I, The Archive is sup­ported by the ADAGP - Villa Vassilieff schol­ar­ship, in part­ner­ship with the Kandinsky Library, MNAM-CCI, Centre-Pompidou.

Actor·actresses : Salomon Mbala Metila, Lou Justine Moua Nedellec, Louna Philip ; Sound engi­neer : Marion Leyrahoux ; Seamstress : Carla Magnier ; Recording studio : Time-Line Factory, Valentin Gueriot ; Handler : Romain Grateau

I, the Archive

“What hap­pens if the his­to­ries you want to know have left no records? ”

Euridice Zaituna Kala is the archive. The archive is enmeshed in the pores of her skin, the folds of her memory and her rec­ol­lec­tions of meet­ings, texts and jour­neys. Invited by the ADAGP (Association for the Development of the Graphic and Visual Arts), Villa Vassilieff and Bibliothèque Kandinsky to work with the Marc Vaux col­lec­tion, Euridice Zaituna Kala has her­self become the archive. Euridice has enthu­si­as­ti­cally taken on this new role by searching for familiar fig­ures from her mem­o­ries and per­sonal set of ref­er­ences: Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, her father Getulio Mario Kala... By becoming the archive, Euridice gathers, sorts and inter­prets infor­ma­tion according to its affec­tive value rather than its his­tor­ical rel­e­vance. Becoming the archive means reclaiming power by writing his­tory free of insti­tu­tional norms. It means shed­ding light on people and geo­graph­ical areas who have been delib­er­ately excluded from his­tor­ical accounts and giving vis­i­bility to groups of people who have been for­gotten by hege­monic nar­ra­tives. “I became this other power that was going to fore­ground what­ever I wanted and how­ever I wanted to por­tray it, regard­less of how it has been estab­lished in existing archives.” By approaching the archive through her indi­vidual sub­jec­tivity and focusing on people she is inti­mately con­nected to, the artist attempts to develop a plural, per­sonal and deviant manner of recounting his­tory.

As Euridice browsed the Marc Vaux col­lec­tion, cer­tain pho­tographs caught her eye: a por­trait of the Black model Aïcha Goblet, sketches of Josephine Baker by Jean de Botton and two por­traits of unknown nude Black models. The artist was drawn to these familiar bodies which resem­bled her own. Euridice reflected on these bodies’ pres­ence in these pho­tographs and their absence from the archives from which mono­lithic nar­ra­tives of modern art have been con­structed. Rather than repro­ducing these pho­tographs in her exhi­bi­tion, the artist instead chose to use nar­ra­tion to draw atten­tion to the bodies frozen and framed in these images – trapped by the pro­jec­tions and fan­tasies of others.

Euridice Zaituna Kala is also inter­ested in absent images: those that have gone missing, those never taken by Marc Vaux, those that have never been located. Who misses these missing images? How did they go missing? Do they exist some­where else other than in the Vaux pho­tographs? The Marc Vaux archives are a mam­moth col­lec­tion. They con­tain more than 127,000 pho­tographs and fea­ture more than 5,000 listed artists and 11,000 boxes of glass plate neg­a­tives. Usually praised for their breadth and com­pre­hen­sive­ness, Euridice demon­strates that, like any archive, the Vaux col­lec­tion is defined by its cre­ator’s sub­jec­tivity and mate­rial con­straints. Figures like Ernest Mancoba, Gerard Sekoto, James Baldwin and Katherine Dunham do not fea­ture in the col­lec­tion. “There are no missing images unless someone is missing them.” Someone must miss these images for their absence to be noticed. History sorts between the remem­bered and the for­gotten. “In Paris”, Euridice told me, “im­ages were sorted by erasing Black bodies. Now, I have a utopian dream of redressing this imbal­ance by putting these bodies back into the archive that erased them.”

Paul Veyne described his­tory as “patch­work knowl­edge” or “mu­ti­lated knowl­edge” due to the scarcity of archives and sources. Yet, his­tory often states, delimits and orders things or sets facts in stone. Here, instead, Kala chooses to ground her exhi­bi­tion in doubt, uncer­tainty and inter­pre­ta­tion. Absence becomes tan­gible, vis­ible and audible. Absence also becomes fic­tion. Voices guide vis­i­tors as they walk through the exhi­bi­tion. This sound piece, written by Euridice Zaituna Kala, blends ref­er­ences to Marc Vaux’s pho­tographs and other pho­tographs with men­tions of Black his­tor­ical fig­ures who spent time in Paris and aut­ofic­tion based on her own expe­ri­ences as a Black, Mozambican, African and migrant woman. The piece is a sen­so­rial nar­ra­tive inspired by Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Royaume d’enfance (Kingdom of Childhood). Senghor used this image to describe his attempts to recreate the lost par­adise of his child­hood in his poetry by redis­cov­ering the power of a child’s imag­i­na­tion. Fiction fills the gaps in archives and joins the dots between par­tial his­tor­ical records. “Po­etry can extend the doc­u­ment.” Bodiless nar­ra­tors give a voice to Marc Vaux’s voice­less images, whis­pering a story that blends dif­ferent periods, char­ac­ters and con­ti­nents. The nar­ra­tive mixes Mozambique and Paris; the artist’s family his­tory with Marc Vaux’s family his­tory; and the past with the pre­sent. It reflects on the dif­fi­culty of accessing archives and the chal­lenges of appro­pri­ating them.

Exhibition view, I, the Archive, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Villa Vassilieff, 2020. © ADAGP, Paris, 2020. Photo : Aurélien Mole.

The voices in the exhi­bi­tion are accom­pa­nied by sculp­tures and visual forms. The space is bathed in coloured lights. One par­tic­ular mate­rial – glass – is par­tic­u­larly promi­nent in the exhi­bi­tion space. Euridice Zaituna Kala’s glass­work allows her to develop an quasi-phys­ical con­nec­tion with Vaux’s archive, by reusing the mate­rial the pho­tog­ra­pher used to create the images in his col­lec­tion: the neg­a­tives from Marc Vaux’s view camera are mounted on glass plates. Euridice has engraved and drawn her own images and mem­o­ries on rect­an­gular pieces of glass that resemble those from the archive, as if adding to Vaux’s col­lec­tion by rein­serting bodies that were excluded from it. However, the artist chooses to work on the glass with mate­rials that fade over time or dis­ap­pear, high­lighting the fragility of our archives and the pre­car­i­ous­ness of our attempts to record our his­to­ries. Glass, as a mate­rial, exem­pli­fies this fragility: how many neg­a­tives must have been lost by falling or through other acci­dents?

Elsewhere in the exhi­bi­tion space, Euridice’s glass sil­hou­ettes subtly recall the nude Black bodies in the archive. These bodies include a model shot by Vaux, a child immor­talised by Ricardo Rangel and a male figure sculpted by Max Le Verrier and pho­tographed by Vaux. Euridice makes these people whose names have been lost pre­sent in the space but does not expose them to the viewer. Their trans­parent sil­hou­ettes make the shapes of their bodies dif­fi­cult to dis­cern – as if they were pre­sent in neg­a­tive. The artist uses these sculp­tures to ques­tion how Black bodies have been appro­pri­ated by var­ious forms of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. How can we rewrite the his­tory of bodies when their images only per­sist through the gaze of the other? How can we once again give these bodies con­trol of their own rep­re­sen­ta­tion and return to them the pri­vacy that pho­tog­raphy has stripped them of? Rather than reap­pro­pri­ating their his­to­ries, Euridice affirms their exis­tence. Further on in the space, the artist cuts up sil­hou­ettes of Josephine Baker’s banana belt and the pro­file of Black model Aïcha Goblet in mirror alu­minium panels. These women who embodied Western fan­tasies become mir­rors showing vis­i­tors their own reflec­tions, sym­bol­ising the pro­jec­tions and expec­ta­tions that have been imposed on these bodies since the 1920s.

Euridice often told me that she imag­ined this exhi­bi­tion as a dance with Marc Vaux, in which each partner takes turns at guiding the other. This dance takes place in a per­me­able space where the archives and the artist mutu­ally influ­ence one another. The artist is shaped by the pho­tographs from the archive she ques­tions in her work. The archive is altered by the gaze of the artist and in turn shapes the per­cep­tions of vis­i­tors. Gazes leave a trace on their objects. Patrimony and archives are not sealed and demar­cated spaces. They are meant to be ques­tioned, appro­pri­ated and reworked. Visitors are, in turn, invited to become the archive – to con­struct and rewrite their own his­tory. “I am the archive; you are the archive.”

Camille Chenais

Translation from French: Michael Angland