Index of quoted names

In the exhi­bi­tion sound piece, many people, cities, songs, char­ac­ters, places,... are quoted or evoked, forming a mesh of per­sonal and his­tor­ical ref­er­ences from the inti­mate sphere of the artist. This index puts these names into con­text.

• Afrikaners

Afrikaners are the descen­dants of the first set­tlers, Dutch, German, French, and other non-British European set­tlers, who arrived in South Africa in the 18th cen­tury. They share a common cul­tural her­itage and lan­guage, Afrikaans, which is derived from Dutch. In the 19th cen­tury, most Afrikaners rejected racial equality. They were strong advo­cates of ethnic dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and seg­re­ga­tion, which led to the estab­lish­ment of apartheid in 1948.

• Joe Alex (1891, Saint-Paul, La Réunion - 1948, Lima, Pérou)

See Joséphine Baker

Joe Alex was a Reunionese actor, singer and dancer. He is well-known for having been Josephine Baker’s partner in the painting La Danse sauvage in the Revue Nègre in 1925, in which the black bodies of the two dancers are staged in a way that is exotic, even erotic, so that they cor­re­spond to the Western imag­i­na­tion of a far­away, stig­ma­tized place [1]. He was also one of the few pre-war black actors, but remained con­fined to the inter­pre­ta­tion of stereo­typ­ical roles: the gentle, smiling and mus­cular black man. From 1923 to 1946, he played in some thirty roles in French films, notably in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du par­adis (1945). In 1938, he directed the Théâtre africain in Paris, whose troupe was entirely black.

• Ana Arone (1965, Morrumbene, Inhambane - 2004, Maputo, Mozambique)

An ama­teur bas­ket­ball player who has worked in the banking system her whole life.

• Isabel Arone (Grand-mère) (1949, Morrumbene, Inhambane - )

A retired, self-taught busi­ness woman who has run var­ious formal and ‘informal’ busi­nesses throughout her life. Lives in Maputo.

• Baie de Delagoa

See Mozambique

Ancient name given to the Bay of Maputo, the Bay of Delagoa is an estuary of the Indian Ocean, located along the coast of Mozambique. The name “De­lagoa” comes from its his­tory as the first sea port of call when arriving from Goa, India.

• Joséphine Baker (1906, Saint-Louis, United States - 1975, Paris, France)

See Joe Alex, Feral Benga, Le Corbusier

Josephine Baker, whose real name was Freda Josephine McDonald, was an Afro-American singer, dancer, actress, cabaret show leader and resis­tance fighter, nat­u­ral­ized in France. Gender and post-colo­nial studies have enabled us to under­stand the com­plexity of the mul­tiple facets of this icon of moder­nity, even if she is often remem­bered only for her banana belt and the staging of her body. In 1925, the man­age­ment of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées entrusted Caroline Dudley Regan, an American living in Paris, with the organ­i­sa­tion of a "black show” [2]. Among other dancers, she recruited Josephine Baker in New York to join the Black Birds, the future troupe of the Revue Nègre. In Paris, the latter became a music-hall star and the muse of the artistic avant-garde; her image was repro­duced every­where and on all media. The image "Joséphine Baker" is both the pro­jec­tion on her black body of a Western imag­i­nary and its crys­tal­liza­tion per­formed. She knew how to invent her own image of stardom and broad­cast cer­tain prod­ucts which she ensured the pro­mo­tion of, while they, in turn, ensured hers. While seeking to cor­re­spond to what the Western and colo­nial view­points pro­jected on her, she "bril­liantly manip­u­lated the imag­i­na­tion of white men" and their fan­tasies while car­i­ca­turing and sub­verting them.
History holds that the Revue Nègre was, unan­i­mously, a real tri­umph. But this asser­tion needs to be qual­i­fied. Indeed, from the end of the 1920s, con­tem­po­rary critics, such as the sis­ters Jane and Paulette Nardal, fore­shad­owed those that post-colo­nial studies would issue against these shows and Western "negrophilia," which had only pro­jected onto black bodies, and their cul­tures, racial stereo­types that cor­re­sponded to the colo­nial imag­i­na­tion.
During the Second World War, Josephine Baker joined the French resis­tance and was awarded the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre. In the early 1960s, she became involved in civil rights strug­gles, taking advan­tage of her world­wide fame and her status as a media icon of pop­ular cul­ture. On August 28, 1963, she was the only woman to speak alongside Martin Luther King in the March to Washington.

• Bal Blomet

See Joséphine Baker, Foujita, Kiki de Montparnasse, Mistinguett, Montparnasse

The Bal Blomet (ex-Bal Nègre) was a famous Caribbean cabaret and jazz club in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, founded in 1924 by Jean Rézard des Wouves. It was located at 33 rue Blomet in the Necker dis­trict, west of Montparnasse. A ver­i­table artistic breeding ground, the artists, musi­cians, dancers, painters and writers of the Roaring Twenties (such as Joséphine Baker, Mistinguett, Tsuguharu Foujita, Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, etc) fre­quented it assid­u­ously

• James A. Baldwin (1924, Harlem, United States - 1987, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France)

See Giovanni, Gerard Sekoto, Harlem, Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture.

James A. Baldwin was an American writer; he pro­duced novels, poetry, short sto­ries, plays and essays. Segregationist laws forced him to leave New York and the United States in 1948. He trav­eled to France and set­tled in Paris, where his mentor, the African-American writer Richard Wright, already lived and fre­quented the intel­lec­tual milieu of the Left Bank. It was there that he wrote some of his most famous novels: Chronicle of a Homeland (1955), Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Harlem Quartet (1979). It was also there that Baldwin under­stood, through his inter­ac­tions with the col­o­nized, that racism was not absent from French cul­ture. In France, he came face to face with the demands of Africans and he com­pared his own con­di­tion to theirs: "The African has not endured the ulti­mate alien­ation of his people and his past. His mother never sang him ’Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child." [3].
In his works, James Baldwin explores the unspoken and the under­lying ten­sions around racial, sexual and class dis­tinc­tions in Western soci­eties, par­tic­u­larly in mid-twen­tieth cen­tury America. Beginning in 1957, he became one of the pro­tag­o­nists of the civil rights move­ment, ana­lyzing the frus­tra­tions of African-Americans and the racial prej­u­dices of whites. His novels and plays trans­pose per­sonal dilemmas into fic­tion, ques­tioning the com­plex social and psy­cho­log­ical pres­sures that hinder the inte­gra­tion of not only black people, but also of gay and bisexual men.

• BAM (Black Arts Movement)

See James Baldwin, Amiri Bakara, Harlem, Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture.

BAM, acronym for Black Arts Movement, was a lit­erary and artistic move­ment formed by a group of African-American writers, poets, play­wrights, artists, and musi­cians. They were polit­i­cally com­mitted to anti-racism and civil rights for African-Americans and hoped to raise the voice of black iden­tity through the arts. Born in 1965, fol­lowing the assas­si­na­tion of Malcolm X, the move­ment is said to have been founded by the poet Amiri Baraka. He is con­sid­ered - in the words of lit­erary critic Larry Neal - as "the aes­thetic and spir­i­tual sister of the Black Power Movement" [4] as well as the Harlem Renaissance move­ment. Among the artists asso­ci­ated with the move­ment are James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others.

• Amiri Baraka (1934, Newark, United States - 2014, Newark, États-Unis)

See BAM (Black Arts Movement)

Everett LeRoi Jones, better known as Amiri Baraka, was an African-American play­wright, nov­elist, short story writer, poet, essayist, pub­lisher and uni­ver­sity pro­fessor. He was the founder, in 1965, of the Black Arts Movement. In the con­text of the civil rights move­ment, Baraka’s work explores the anger of African-Americans. He used his writ­ings as a weapon against racism, and to express his polit­ical claims. The role of the artist is, according to him, "to raise people’s con­scious­ness." [5] With his poems, he aimed to create an aes­thetics freed from Western canons. In 1968, Baraka con­verted to Islam and added to his name the prefix Imamu, meaning "spir­i­tual leader." In 1974, how­ever, he embraced Marxist thought and aban­doned this prefix.

• Feral Benga (1906, Dakar, Sénégal - 1957, Châteauroux, France)

See Joe Alex, Joséphine Baker

François "Féral" Benga was a Senegalese dancer and chore­og­ra­pher who moved to Paris in 1923. In 1926, he danced in La Folie du Jour at the Folies-Bergère, star­ring Joséphine Baker. Benga spent a large part of his career at the music hall, where he per­formed "exotic" chore­ogra­phies based on stereo­types, those of a "negro dance," which responded to the clichés of the time. [6]. Praised by the French press, who dubbed him "L’Étoile noire," Benga also toured the United States, becoming one of the role models for Renaissance Harlem artists. In 1933, Benga, seeking to offer another vision of African tra­di­tions, staged a chore­o­graphic cre­ation with Jean Fazil at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Gala de danses blanc et noir, where African dance was accom­pa­nied by clas­sical music and negro spir­i­tuals. He met the English anthro­pol­o­gist Geoffrey Gorer and together they departed on a long study trip that crossed West Africa in order to dis­cover African chore­o­graphic tra­di­tions. In 1947, he opened La Rose Rouge in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a famous cabaret-the­atre ded­i­cated to the dif­fu­sion of the voice of Negritude [7].

• Beyoncé (1981, Houston, United States - )

Beyoncé Giselle Carter, full name Beyoncé Giselle Carter, is an African-American singer. She began her career with the group Destiny’s Child, before going solo in 2003. In her album Lemonade, released in 2016, she addressed not only her per­sonal his­tory as a black woman, but also that of the African dias­pora and its cul­tures through numerous ref­er­ences both in the texts of the songs and in the images of the clips that illus­trate them. In 2018, she was the first black woman to head­line the Coachella Music Festival. The doc­u­men­tary Homecoming [8], directed by Beyoncé and released in 2019 on Netflix, looks back on this per­for­mance, places it in the artist’s career, and posi­tions the event as the cul­mi­na­tion of a global pro­ject of research and recog­ni­tion of Black and African-American cul­ture.

• Black History Month

Black History Month is an annual cel­e­bra­tion ded­i­cated to the his­tory and achieve­ments of African Americans and a time to rec­og­nize their con­tri­bu­tion to U.S. his­tory. The event was cre­ated by American his­to­rian Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) in 1926. Since 2018, the asso­ci­a­tion Mémoires & Partages has been car­rying out a sim­ilar ini­tia­tive in Bordeaux, to pay tribute to Afro-Western people and their his­tory.

• Bochiman

See Khoïsan

The term Bushman refers to a group of nomadic indige­nous hunter-gath­erer peo­ples of southern Africa. The French term "Bochimans" is derived from the Dutch word "bosjesman," intro­duced by the Boers (white pioneers of South Africa) during the colo­nial period, and lit­er­ally meaning "bushmen". The term Bushman, tinged with colo­nial racism, tends to be replaced by San. The Bushmen, or San, are con­sid­ered to be the oldest inhab­i­tants of southern Africa, where they have lived for over 44,000 years. Persecuted by the Bantu and Boers, then marginal­ized by British set­tlers, they occupy a ter­ri­tory that has been reduced to the Kalahari Desert.

• Jean Isy de Botton (1898, Salonique, Grèce - 1978, New-York, United States)

Jean Isy de Botton was a French painter, sculptor and engraver. Several pho­tographs of his works are held in the Marc Vaux col­lec­tion, including draw­ings of Josephine Baker dancing.

• Marcel Camus (1912, Chappes, France - 1982, Paris, France)

See Eurydice, Marpessa Dawn

Marcel Camus was a French director best known for his film Orfeu Negro, an adap­ta­tion of a play by Vinícius de Moraes, Orfeu da Conceição. The film is a trans­po­si­tion, set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro during car­nival, of the loves of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was a world­wide suc­cess, receiving the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 as well as an Oscar for Best Foreign Film the fol­lowing year.

• Joaquim Chissano (1939, Chibuto, Mozambique -)

See Mozambique

Joaquim Chissano is a Mozambican politi­cian, President of the Republic of Mozambique from 1986 to 2005, and one of the key fig­ures of FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), which played an active role in securing the country’s inde­pen­dence in 1975.

• Marpessa Dawn (1934, Pittsburgh, United States - 2008, Paris, France)

See Marcel Camus

Marpessa Dawn, born Gypsy Marpessa Menor, was an African-American actress, dancer and singer, nat­u­ral­ized French. She is known for having played Eurydice, the leading female role in the film Orfeu Negro by Marcel Camus (1959).

• Gaby Deslys (1881 Marseille, France - 1920, Paris, France)

Marie-Élise Gabrielle Caire, known as Gaby Deslys, was a French singer, magazine leader, music-hall artist, and Belle Époque star of inter­na­tional stature. In 1917, she led the revue Laisse-les Tomber! at the Casino de Paris, and was one of the first to inte­grate a jazz band in the French cap­ital.

• Cheikh Anta Diop (1923, Thieytou, Sénégal - 1986, Dakar, Sénégal )

Historian, sci­en­tist and politi­cian, Sheikh Anta Diop endeav­oured to demon­strate the con­tri­bu­tion of Africa, and in par­tic­ular Black Africa, to world cul­ture and civ­i­liza­tion. In his thesis pub­lished under the title of Nations nègres et cul­ture (1954), he devel­oped the theory of a pro­foundly African ancient Egypt. Following this pub­li­ca­tion, the French aca­demic com­mu­nity reproached him for having a polit­ical and ide­o­log­ical, rather than strictly sci­en­tific, reading of African his­tory. Despite the con­tro­ver­sies, thirty-three years after his death, his work con­tinues to influ­ence research in African his­tory, as well as more broadly, the polit­ical, philo­soph­ical, eco­nomic and cul­tural thinking of the con­ti­nent and its dias­poras

• Kaye Dunn

See Katherine Dunham

• Katherine Dunham (1909, Glen Ellyn, United States - 2006, New-York, United States)

See Kaye Dunn, Henri Matisse

Katherine Dunham (pseudonym Kaye Dunn) was an African-American dancer, chore­og­ra­pher, anthro­pol­o­gist, civil rights activist, writer and actress. Considered one of the pioneers of African-American dance, she is known as the Mother of Black Dance. In the 1920s, she attended dance classes led by Ludmilla Speranzeva, Vera Mirova, Mark Turbyfill and Ruth Page, some of the few clas­sical ballet teachers who accepted African-American stu­dents at the time. Her chore­o­graphic style is marked by a fusion of cul­tures with Caribbean, sub-Saharan, South American and African-American influ­ences. In the 1940s, she cre­ated the Katherine Dunham Company, the first African-American con­tem­po­rary dance com­pany that refused to per­form on seg­re­gated stages. At the same time, she studied anthro­pology and wrote a thesis on the dances of Haiti, which was pub­lished in French in 1950 with a preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss [9]. From 1966 to 1967, she was tech­nical and cul­tural advisor to the President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor.

• Erzulie Freda

Erzulie or Ezili is a Lwa (spirit, deity) of the voodoo pan­theon. Divinity of beauty, love and desire, she embodies the figure of the fem­i­nine. She has been assim­i­lated with the bib­lical figure of Mary, from whom she bor­rows cer­tain iconog­raphy, espe­cially that of the mater dolorosa and Our Lady of Mount Carmel: white and pink veils, golden crown sur­rounded by hearts.

• Eurydice

In Greek mythology, Eurydice is a dryad (tree nymph) and the com­panion of Orpheus, a poet and musi­cian. Bitten by a snake, she dies on their wed­ding day. Inconsolable, Orpheus sings a lament, and moves the gods who grant him per­mis­sion to descend to the Underworld to save her. Hades, the God of the Underworld, agrees to let Orpheus bring her back to the world of the living, on the sole con­di­tion that Orpheus does not turn around until he has com­pletely ascended from the Underworld. Just as he is about to reach day­light, he turns to see if his wife is behind him. The promise made to Hades is broken and Eurydice dies a second time, and remains caught in Hades.
What if it was Eurydice who had said to Orpheus, "turn around?" Indeed, the mytho­log­ical account pre­sents us with a pas­sive Eurydice, one who is exclu­sively depen­dent on Orpheus; pas­sivity and depen­dence taken up by modern and con­tem­po­rary inter­pre­ta­tions. We must wait for fem­i­nist thought to take hold of this char­acter to make her an active sub­ject, who could have chosen not to follow Orpheus [10].

• Tsuguharu Foujita (1886, Tokyo, Japan - 1968, Zurich, Switzerland)

See Bal Blomet, Aïcha Goblet, Kiki de Montparnasse, Montparnasse

Tsuguharu Foujita left Japan for Paris in 1913 to pursue his career as an artist. His work is char­ac­ter­ized by a syn­cretism between the Japanese pic­to­rial tra­di­tion, par­tic­u­larly the art of print­making, and the pic­to­rial reflec­tions of Western moder­nity. In the 1920s, he was one of the cen­tral fig­ures of artistic Paris, and more par­tic­u­larly of the Montparnasse of the Roaring Twenties.

• Giovanni

See James Bladwin

A char­acter cre­ated by James A. Baldwin, Giovanni is one of the pro­tag­o­nists of the novel Giovanni’s Room (1956). In this work, he main­tains a tor­mented pas­sion with David, a young American expa­triate in Paris. The novel deals with homo­sex­u­ality, the social and psy­cho­log­ical pres­sures that hinder the inte­gra­tion of gay or bisexual men, as well as the inter­nal­ized obsta­cles that pre­vent such quests for accep­tance.

• Aïcha Goblet (1898, France - ? )

See Tsuguharu Foujita, Henri Matisse, Montparnasse

Aïcha Goblet is said to have been born in the north of France to a Flemish mother and a Martinican father, a jug­gler in a circus in which she also per­formed, begin­ning at the age of 6. During a circus per­for­mance in Clamart, she attracted the atten­tion of the painter Jules Pascin and posed for him in the 1910s, along with another Martinican model, Julie Luce. She then moved to Paris, staying at the Villa Falguière, and became the model for many artists. She posed for Kees Van Dongen, Moïse Kisling, Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita, but also for Henri Matisse (Aïcha et Lorette) and Félix Vallotton (La Noire et la Blanche). She inspired André Salmon in his novel La Négresse du Sacré-Coeur (The Negress of the Sacred Heart, 1920). She called her­self Ayesha, and fre­quented the artistic com­mu­nity of Montparnasse in the 1920s and its cafés - Le Dôme, La Coupole, etc. In Montparnasse, where, in her words, "they didn’t even know I spoke French," [11] her con­tem­po­raries seem to have pro­jected on her, and her body, their fan­ta­sized image of Africa. She her­self seems to play on this ambi­guity, trans­forming her body to cor­re­spond to the stereo­typ­ical image imposed on her: she adorned her hair with a turban, an object that evoked in itself, under the gaze of the painters who immor­tal­ized it, the imag­i­nary that the West pro­jects onto the else­where, whether it be Orient or Africa.

• Harlem

See BAM, James Bladwin, Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture

Harlem is a neigh­bor­hood in the northern bor­ough of Manhattan, New York, in the United States, where the African-American com­mu­nity is still pre­dom­i­nant. At the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury, the Harlem Renaissance move­ment made the neigh­bor­hood the locus of African-American cul­ture, later it became one of the cen­ters of the struggle for equal civil rights.

• If I Were a Boy

If I Were a Boy is the title of a song from Beyoncé’s third album I Am...Sasha Fierce, released in 2008. In it, Beyoncé sings about what she would be allowed to do if she were a man. Both the song and the album were an inter­na­tional suc­cess.

• Ilha de Moçambique

See Mozambique, Mussa Bin Binque

The island of Mozambique, in Portuguese Ilha de Moçambique, is an island located in the Mozambique Canal. This island has given its name to the entire main­land coast facing it, and to the country of which it is a part. Its name comes from that of Sultan Mussa Bin Bique, who ruled the island before the Portuguese col­o­niza­tion.

• Euridice Zaituna Kala (1987, Maputo, Mozambique - )

Euridice Zaituna Kala is a Mozambican artist based in Paris. Her artistic work focuses on cul­tural and his­tor­ical meta­mor­phoses, its manip­u­la­tions and adap­ta­tions. The artist seeks to high­light the mul­ti­plicity of his­tor­ical periods and social rela­tions within the African con­ti­nent, which is at the heart of her reflec­tions. These nar­ra­tives take place in spaces of depar­tures, encoun­ters... in the form of instal­la­tions, per­for­mances, images and books.
Euridice Zaituna Kala was trained in pho­tog­raphy at the Market Photo Workshop (MPW-2012) in Johannesburg. She has par­tic­i­pated in numerous group exhi­bi­tions including the 1st edi­tion of the Stellenbosch Triennial (2020), the second edi­tion of the Lagos Biennial (2019), Hubert Fichte : Love and Ethnology at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019-2020), the 14th Fellbach Triennial for Small Sculpture: 40,000 - A Museum of Curiosity. (2019), The Power from Within, The Gallery, Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Mistake! Mistake ! Said the Rooster... and stepped down from the Duck, Lumiar Cité, Lisbon (2017), Infecting the City, Cape Town (2017) and (Co)Habitar, Casa da America Latina, Lisbon (2017). She has pre­sented numerous 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 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, estab­lished in 2017.

• Getulio Kala (1959, Maputo, Mozambique - 1992, Maputo, Mozambique)

Works in the banking system. Lives with his family.

• Getulio Kala Jr. (1990, Maputo, Mozambique -)

Frère d’Euridice Zaituna Kala. Il tra­vaille dans une banque à Maputo où il vit avec sa famille.

• Kim Kardashian (1980, Los Angeles, United States -)

See Spanx

Kim Kardashian is an American media per­son­ality and busi­ness­woman. Since 2007, she and her family have starred in the hit reality TV show, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” An archetype of the star-system, she cul­ti­vates her image on social net­works and in the media. In 2015, she was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influ­en­tial people in the world. In 2019, she launched her brand of sheathing lin­gerie inspired by the Spanx brand. Available in nine skin tones, from XXS to 4XL, the line’s prod­ucts are intended to be inclu­sive. Initially named Kimono Solutionwear, she renamed her brand Skims Solutionwear fol­lowing accu­sa­tions of cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion.

• Kiki de Montparnasse (1901, Châtillon-sur-Seine, France - 1953, Paris, France)

See Tsuguharu Foujita, Montparnasse

Kiki de Montparnasse or Kiki, is the pseudonym of Alice Ernestine Prin who was known as "the Queen of Montparnasse." She came from a modest back­ground and set­tled in Paris in 1913, where she became a famous model, posing for Amedeo Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita, Man Ray, Chaïm Soutine, etc. She was also a singer, dancer, cabaret man­ager, painter and film actress.

• Khoïsan

See Bochiman

Khoïsan is a term that covers two ethnic groups in southern Africa: the San hunter-gath­erers and the Khoikhoi pas­toral­ists The Khoïsan are among the many peo­ples who were dis­pos­sessed of their lands by colo­nial author­i­ties in the 19th and early 20th cen­turies. After the end of apartheid, the South African gov­ern­ment allowed them to make land claims to recover their lands that taken after 1913.

• Le Corbusier (1887 La Chaux-de-Fonds, Suisse - 1965, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France)

See Joséphine Baker, Villa Savoye

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known under the pseudonym Le Corbusier, was one of the main rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the modern move­ment in archi­tec­ture. It is said he met Joesphine Baker in November 1929 on board the cruise ship Giulio Cesare, which they both took from Bordeaux to São Paulo. He wrote in his diary: “In a ridicu­lous music hall in São Paulo, Josephine Baker sang Baby with a sen­si­tivity so intense and the­atrical that it moved me to tears.” Josephine Baker [12], for her part, found him “cheerful and simple” and described him as “a man of heart.” She even said: “what a pity you are an archi­tect, you would have been a good com­panion.” [13]
During the same period, Le Corbusier was working on the con­struc­tion of the Villa Savoye, thought to be a true archi­tec­tural man­i­festo, which Euridice imag­ines may have been inspired by his meeting with Josephine Baker.
Le Corbusier’s legacy is now being ques­tioned; his work and archi­tec­tural the­o­ries are being re-exam­ined in the light of his polit­ical affil­i­a­tions with fas­cist regimes.

• Amilcar Lopes da Costa Cabral (1924, Bafatà, Guinée-Bissau - 1973, Conakry, Guinée)

Amilcar Cabral, also known as Abel Djassi, was a Guinean politi­cian and one of the founders of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde). Created in 1956, the PAIGC actively par­tic­i­pated in obtaining the inde­pen­dence of these two states. Following the growth of fis­sures within the group, Cabral was assas­si­nated on 20 January 1973 in Conakry by mem­bers of the mil­i­tary wing of his own party, pre­sum­ably under the influ­ence of the Portuguese author­i­ties.

• Josina Machel (1945, Vilankulo, Mozambique - 1971, Dar es Salam, Tanzanie)

See Samora Machel, Mozambique

Josina Machel was a Mozambican fem­i­nist and inde­pen­dence activist. A member of a women’s group of FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front), the Destacamento Feminino (Feminine Detachment), she received mil­i­tary training and was actively involved in the struggle. It was there she met Samora Machel, her future hus­band, who would become the first pres­i­dent of inde­pen­dent Mozambique in 1975. Josina Machel is one of the key players in the inde­pen­dence of Mozambique and a fem­i­nist icon in the his­tory of the pan-African lib­er­a­tion strug­gles.

• Samora Machel (1933, Chilembene, Mozambique - 1986, Mbuzini, Afrique du Sud)

See Josina Machel, Mozambique

Samora Machel is a Mozambican politi­cian, member of FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), first pres­i­dent of the inde­pen­dent People’s Republic of Mozambique between 1975 and 1986 and the hus­band of Josina Machel. He is con­sid­ered one of the fathers of Mozambique’s inde­pen­dence. In 1986, he died in a plane crash whose causes remain unclear. His death con­tinues to be a sub­ject of spec­u­la­tion.

• Ernest Mancoba (1904, Johannesburg, Afrique du Sud - 2002, Clamart, France)

Ernest Mancoba was a French-South African writer, thinker and painter. He fled South Africa and apartheid for Europe and set­tled in France in 1938. After the Second World War, he and his wife Sonja Ferlov went to Denmark, where she intro­duced him to Asger Jorn. Although he actively par­tic­i­pated in the CoBrA move­ment there, his work is often for­gotten in his­to­ries of the move­ment. The artist and aca­demic Rasheed Araeen [14] defends the idea that Mancoba’s oblit­er­a­tion is the result of Western racism and eth­no­cen­trism; his work has only recently been rec­og­nized thanks to the rereading and decen­tering of the mod­ernist nar­ra­tive.

• Maputo

See Mozambique

Capital of Mozambique.

• Henri Matisse (1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France - 1954, Nice, France)

See Aïcha, Joséphine Baker, Katherine Dunham, Picasso

Henri Matisse is a French painter, sculptor, draughtsman, engraver, and one of the major fig­ures of modern art in the first part of the 20th cen­tury. Like many of his con­tem­po­raries, he expresses in his work an interest for what were then called "prim­i­tive" [15] arts in which Western mod­ernism seems to rec­og­nize its own con­cerns and formal research. His view of these cul­tures and their pro­duc­tions is partly coloured by the Western pic­to­rial tra­di­tion of the 19th cen­tury, a dreamy image of the East and the pro­jec­tion of a cer­tain exoti­cism on beings, their bodies and their cul­tures. Over the course of his career, Matisse por­trayed many black women in his paint­ings, including Aïcha who posed for him in Aïcha et Lorette (1917), Katherine Dunham who is said to be the inspi­ra­tion for the Creole Dancer (1950), and Elvire Van Hyfte who he depicts in Dame à la robe blanche (1946). In the 1930s, he stayed in New York, where he vis­ited many Harlem jazz clubs, and showed a strong interest in black cul­ture.

• Mistinguett (1875 Enghien-les-bains, France - 1956, Bougival, France)

Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois, known as Mistinguett, was a French singer, actress and revue leader, star of the Moulin Rouge, the Mecca of the Paris music hall of the Belle Époque.

• Montparnasse

See Joséphine Baker, Bal Blomet, Aïcha, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marc Vaux

The Montparnasse dis­trict is located on the left bank of the Seine. Its name was given to it by the stu­dents who came to declaim verses on the mound formed by embank­ments in the 17th cen­tury, and refers to the Mount Parnassus, res­i­dence of the Muses in Greek mythology. At the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury, this working-class dis­trict attracted many artists, both French and for­eign, who made it a hub of artistic moder­nity.
There are few traces of this artistic Montparnasse; the dis­trict was com­pletely trans­formed in the 1960s to meet the polit­ical ambi­tions of reimag­ining Montparnasse as the busi­ness dis­trict of the Left Bank of Paris, with Maine-Montparnasse Tower as the symbol.

• Mozambique

See Joaquim Chissano, Josina Machel , Samora Machel, Mussa Bin Binque, Ricardo Rangel, Marcelino dos Santos

Mozambique is a country located on the east coast of the African con­ti­nent whose his­tory is deeply marked by Portuguese col­o­niza­tion and sub­se­quently by the inde­pen­dence move­ments of the 20th cen­tury. Portuguese set­tle­ment began in the early 16th cen­tury with the second expe­di­tion of Vasco de Gama. The Portuguese set up trading posts, exploiting the roads and trade that existed prior to their arrival, engaging in the prof­itable traffic of ivory, coal, gold, sugar cane, tea and cotton. They also devel­oped the Black slave trade, then prac­ticed by the Arabs.
On June 25, 1962, sev­eral anti-colo­nial groups founded FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), a move­ment that advo­cated a global rejec­tion of the colo­nial-cap­i­talist system and that placed armed insur­rec­tion and guer­rilla war­fare at the centre of the polit­ical struggle. On the 7th of September 1974, an agree­ment was signed in Lusaka between Portugal and FRELIMO, set­ting a timetable for the estab­lish­ment of a pro­vi­sional gov­ern­ment with a view towards the procla­ma­tion of Mozambique’s inde­pen­dence. On June 25th 1975, Mozambique’s inde­pen­dence was pro­claimed and Samora Machel became its first President. The country then plunged into a six­teen-year civil war, fuelled by the Western geopo­lit­ical land­scape, which pitted the forces of FRELIMO against those of the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO), financed and sup­ported first by Rhodesia and then by South Africa.
In 1990, on the eve of the col­lapse of the Soviet Union, the first peace talks took place between FRELIMO and RENAMO, leading to a new con­sti­tu­tion in November that rec­og­nized polit­ical plu­ralism. In 1994, the elec­tions resulted in the vic­tory of Joaquim Chissano’s FRELIMO.

• Musée du Louvre

See Marc Vaux

The Musée du Louvre is one of the largest museums in the world. In 1939, during the Second World War, the works of art in the Louvre Museum were evac­u­ated and taken to storage sites far from cities and oft-trav­eled thor­ough­fares to pro­tect them from bombing. The steps involved in evac­u­ating the works of art from the Louvre, including their packing and trans­porta­tion by truck, the empty rooms left behind, as well as their return after the war and the reopening of the museum, are the sub­ject of sev­eral pho­to­graphic cam­paigns. Marc Vaux was one of the pho­tog­ra­phers com­mis­sioned to pro­duce a photo-reportage.

• Musée national d’ethnographie de Nampula

Inaugurated on August 23rd, 1956, under the name "Museo Comandante Eugénio Ferreira de Almeida," by General Craveiro Lopes in a building designed by archi­tect Mario Oliveira, the National Ethnography Museum of Nampula (in Portuguese, Museu Nacional de Etnografía de Nampula) is the only national museum not located in the Mozambican cap­ital, Maputo. The pioneer of this pro­ject was the ethno­g­ra­pher Soares de Castro.

• Mussa Bin Bique

See Ilha de Moçambique, Mozambique

Mussa Bin Bique ( Arabic: موسى بن بيك ), was a Muslim sultan from the Island of Mozambique, which was over­taken by the Portuguese in 1544. It is the name of this sovereign, in Portuguese Moçambique, first used to des­ig­nate the island of Mozambique, then the entire main­land coast facing it, the cur­rent Mozambique.

• Nampula

See Mozambique, Musée national d’ethno­gra­phie de Nampula

Nampula, known as the "cap­ital of the North," is the cap­ital of Mozambique’s third most densely pop­u­lated province.

• Orphée

See Eurydice

• G. Pernolles

When one enters "Mozambique" in the dig­ital database of the Marc Vaux Fund, the only result is a post­card stamped and sent from Mozambique by G. Pernolles to Mr. and Mrs. Vaux on 20 December 1957.

• Pablo Picasso (1881, Malaga, Spain - 1973, Mougins, France)

Pablo Picasso is a Spanish painter, sculptor, draughtsman and engraver, who spent most of his life in France. He is con­sid­ered one of the major artists of the 20th cen­tury and one of the key fig­ures of modern art. Like many of his con­tem­po­raries, he looked at and col­lected so-called "prim­i­tive" art - the term des­ig­nating, without dis­tinc­tion, African or Oceanian arte­facts - in which Western mod­ernism seems to rec­og­nize its own pre­oc­cu­pa­tions and formal research. In 1907, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: five women, par­tially naked, whose faces seem to be ren­dered in the manner of African masks. The painting is con­sid­ered one of the mile­stones in the his­tory of 20th cen­tury art, because of the stylistic rup­ture it embodies. Although the painting is still con­sid­ered one of the ear­liest Cubist paint­ings today, reread­ings of the mod­ernist nar­ra­tive have made it pos­sible to re-examine the status of this work within art his­tory. The painting crys­tal­lizes the recent crit­i­cisms made by gender and post­colo­nial studies against mod­ernism, mas­cu­line and Western-cen­tred. The African-American artist Faith Ringgold has taken Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to create her own ver­sion, Picasso’s Studio. She places a naked black woman at the centre of Picasso’s com­po­si­tion, thus ques­tioning the place of Africa (and the black model) within the nar­ra­tive of mod­ernist art his­tory.

• Présence africaine

See Joséphine Baker, James Bladwin, Léopold Sédar Senghor

Présence africaine is a bian­nual pan-African journal, founded in 1947 on the ini­tia­tive of Alioune Diop (1910-1980), a Senegalese pro­fessor of phi­los­ophy, with the sup­port of intel­lec­tuals, writers and anthro­pol­o­gists such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Richard Wright, Albert Camus, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Leiris, Joséphine Baker and James Baldwin. The journal aims to pub­lish "texts by Africans," "Africanist studies on African cul­ture and civ­i­liza­tion," and to review "works of art or thought con­cerning the black world." [16] It is also a pub­lishing house, founded in 1949, and a book­shop located in the Latin Quarter in Paris, at 25bis, rue des Écoles. During the 1950s and 1960s, the magazine actively cam­paigned for the inde­pen­dence of African col­o­nized coun­tries and the emer­gence of an inde­pen­dent African cul­ture.

• Ricardo Rangel (1924, Maputo, Mozambique - 2009, Maputo, Mozambique)

See Mozambique

Ricardo Rangel was a Mozambican pho­to­jour­nalist and pho­tog­ra­pher. He was the first non-white pho­to­jour­nalist to work for a Portuguese news­paper, Noticias de Tarde, as early as 1952, well before the country’s inde­pen­dence in 1975. In 1970, he co-founded Tempo magazine, Mozambique’s first poly­chrome magazine and a voice of oppo­si­tion to the Portuguese colo­nial power. His work, ori­ented towards the denun­ci­a­tion of col­o­niza­tion, of the unjust and the social and racial inequal­i­ties resulting from it, earned him sev­eral incar­cer­a­tions. Its photos - doc­u­men­tary, engaged and crit­ical - are pre­cious tes­ti­monies of Mozambique’s his­tory.
Eager to train a new gen­er­a­tion of pho­tog­ra­phers and pho­to­jour­nal­ists, and well aware of the power of the image, he founded the Mozambique Photography Training and Documentation Centre in the 1980s.

• Saint-Louis (Sénégal)

Saint-Louis, Ndar in Wolof, often called "Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal," is one of the largest cities in Senegal.

• Marcelino dos Santos (1929, Mumbo, Mozambique portuguais - 2020, Maputo, Mozambique)

See Mozambique

Marcelino dos Santos was a Mozambican politi­cian and poet. He was one of the founding mem­bers of FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front). In 1975, after Mozambique’s inde­pen­dence, he became Minister of Planning and Development, a post he relin­quished in 1977 to become the President of the country’s first Parliament, of which he remained President until the first multi-party elec­tions in 1994. He pub­lished most of his poems under the pseudonyms Kalungano and Lilinho Micaia

• Didier Schulmann

See Marc Vaux, Fonds Marc Vaux

Didier Schulmann is curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Pompidou and head of depart­ment at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky until July 2020. He was one of Euridice’s priv­i­leged inter­locu­tors throughout his work on the Marc Vaux col­lec­tion.

• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

See James Bladwin, Harlem

Founded in 1925, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a New York cul­tural insti­tu­tion and research library, a branch of the New York Public Library, located in Harlem (515 Malcolm X Boulevard). It is one of the world’s leading cul­tural insti­tu­tions ded­i­cated to the research, preser­va­tion, and exhi­bi­tion of mate­rials focusing on the his­tory and expe­ri­ences of the African-American com­mu­nity and the dias­pora.

• Gerard Sekoto (1913 Botshabelo, South Africa - 1993, Paris, France)

See Ernest Mancoba

Gerard Sekoto was a South African painter and musi­cian. Self-taught, he began his artistic career in 1938, when he left the coun­tryside of northern South Africa to go to Johannesburg . His painting focuses on the depic­tion of people’s lives in the town­ships, and on a quasi-doc­u­men­tary recording of these urban envi­ron­ments, lifestyles, and the racial ten­sions that inhabit them. In 1947, encour­aged by Ernest Mancoba, Sekoto left South Africa and moved to Paris where he met the thinkers who con­tributed to the move­ment of Negritude. His painting and his sculp­tural lan­guage were charged with reflec­tions on exile and oth­er­ness, on iden­tity and on the fluc­tu­a­tion of this notion. He found expa­tri­a­tion dif­fi­cult, a ner­vous break­down left him interned at the Sainte-Anne hos­pital [17]. When he was released, Marthe Baillon offered him to move into the room left vacant by a young American writer, James Baldwin.

• Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906 Joal, Sénégal - 2001, Verson, France)

See Présence Africaine

Léopold Sédar Senghor was a poet, writer, French and Senegalese statesman, and the first President of the Republic of Senegal (1960-1980). His poems, sym­bolist and incan­ta­tory, are inspired by tra­di­tional African rhythms - "for poetry is song, if not music" [18] - and express his uni­ver­salist ideal: "the civ­i­liza­tion of the uni­versal." He also seeked to express what he calls the "Kingdom of Childhood," a kind of lost par­adise, which refers both to the world of ideas and beliefs in which he grew up, as a child with his mother before entering the Catholic school, but also to a kind of Eden of pre-colo­nial Africa. In addi­tion, he deep­ened and par­tic­i­pated in the the­o­riza­tion of the con­cept of Negritude, a notion intro­duced by Aimé Césaire. In 1934, in the columns of L’Étudiant noir, Senghor pro­posed a def­i­ni­tion: "Negritude is the set of cul­tural values of the black world, as they are expressed in the life, insti­tu­tions and works of black people. I say it is a reality: a knot of real­i­ties."
If Euridice Zaituna Kala refers to Eurydice here, per­haps it is to be the fem­i­nine coun­ter­part of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus). Orphée Noir is then the title of the preface signed by the French philoso­pher for the Anthologie de la poésie nègre et mal­gache de langue française pub­lished in 1948 by the Senegalese poet Léonard Sédar Senghor [19].

• Spanx

See Kim Kardashian

Created in 1998, Spanx is an American brand spe­cial­ized in sheathing lin­gerie. Nicknamed "Hollywood’s secret," it is known to be worn by comedy actors and actresses on red car­pets but is often crit­i­cized for its par­tic­i­pa­tion in the con­struc­tion and per­pet­u­a­tion of oppres­sive and stig­ma­tizing phys­ical stan­dards.

• Tristaïveté

See Père (Getulio Kala)

Tristaïveté (Painaivite in its orig­inal ver­sion) is a neol­o­gism cre­ated by the artist from the con­trac­tion of the two words "sad­ness" and "naivety" to describe the feeling, the emo­tion she expe­ri­enced as a child at the dis­ap­pear­ance of her father.

• Marc Vaux (1895, Crulai, France - 1971, Paris, France)

See Montparnasse, Musée du Louvre

A former car­penter, he trained as a pho­tog­ra­pher after being wounded in the right arm when he was mobi­lized as a sol­dier during the First World War. After the war, equipped with a camera that he kept all his life, and encour­aged by his wife, he took por­traits of sol­diers on leave and of his neigh­bors on Maine Avenue. He met the sculptor Charles Desvergnes who wanted to have his works pho­tographed, and thus began his career as an art pho­tog­ra­pher. He immor­tal­ized not only the artistic avant-garde of the begin­ning of the cen­tury - the artists, their works, their stu­dios, and their exhi­bi­tions - but also the life of his neigh­bor­hood, leaving a pre­cious tes­ti­mony of what Montparnasse was like in the post-war period.
In 1939, he was one of the pho­tog­ra­phers com­mis­sioned to report on the move of the Louvre Museum. During the Second World War, he joined the Resistance: he rented a room in his name where sev­eral Resistance fighters wanted by the Gestapo were hiding. In 1946, sen­si­tive to the pre­car­ious sit­u­a­tion of artists, he opened the Foyer d’Entre’Aide aux Artistes at 89 boule­vard du Montparnasse. In addi­tion to a can­teen to feed the artists, this home allows them to exhibit for free. On October 13, 1951, Marc Vaux opened the Musée de Montparnasse, 10 rue de l’Arrivée in a former premises of the Académie du Montparnasse. But this museum is ephemeral and closes after a few years, victim of devel­op­ment pro­jects in the neigh­bor­hood. On February 25, 1971, Marc Vaux died of a heart attack in the middle of the street. His archives were sold, after his death, to the Centre Pompidou.

• Fonds Marc Vaux

See Marc Vaux

Marc Vaux pho­tographed nearly 5,000 artists - from France and around the world - and their works in their Parisian stu­dios from the 1920s onward, pro­ducing, until the early 1970s, more than 127,000 pho­tographs. The study of this col­lec­tion, which is now kept at the Centre Pompidou and whose dig­i­ti­za­tion has just been com­pleted, makes it pos­sible to develop a por­trait of Paris as a cre­ative hub with a hybrid and transna­tional lan­guage, nour­ished by indi­vidual his­to­ries or polit­ical and artistic com­mit­ments too often melted into the linéar­ité́ offi­cial nar­ra­tives of a homo­ge­neous moder­nité́.

• Marie-Louise Vaux ( 1898, Saint-Sulpice-Le-Dunois, France - 1973, Sagnat, France)

The deed of sale of the Marc Vaux Fund at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, dated February 22nd 1980, reveals her name: she is no longer only "Marc Vaux’s wife", but Marie-Louise Vaux, née Parinaud. She would have encour­aged and helped her hus­band in his work as a pho­tog­ra­pher, and would be the one who would have written in gouache the names of the artists on the boxes con­taining the pho­to­graphic plates on glass.

• Vénus Hottentote

Saartjie Baartman (an imposed Europeanized name), whose real name is Sawtche, was a Khoisan woman born at the end of the 19th cen­tury in South Africa. She was bought in South Africa by an English "showman," and nick­named the "Venus Hottentot." [20] She was exhib­ited (and sex­u­ally exploited) in England and France from 1810 to 1814. After her death, in Paris in December 1815, she was dis­sected by Georges Cuvier, in the name of the "pro­gress of human knowl­edge.” Her brain, anus and gen­ital organs were pre­served in jars of formalde­hyde. The report on the dis­sec­tion bears wit­ness not only to racist prej­u­dices, but also to the way in which science is used to derive the­o­ries that cor­rob­o­rate them. A plaster cast of Sawtche’s body and skeleton, allegedly proof of the supe­ri­ority of the "white race," were exhib­ited until 1974 at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. In 1994, after the end of apartheid, South African President Nelson Mandela asked France to return Sawtche’s body. These requests were met with a refusal from the author­i­ties in the name of the inalien­able her­itage of the state and science. A spe­cial resti­tu­tion law had to be passed in March 2002 to force the return of Sawtche’s body to South Africa for burial.

• Villa Savoye

See Joséphine Baker, Le Corbusier

The Villa Savoye, built from 1928 to 1931 on a seven-hectare plot of land in Poissy (Yvelines), is part of the "white villas" cycle by the archi­tect Le Corbusier. A true archi­tec­tural man­i­festo, it is the per­fect illus­tra­tion of Le Corbusier’s thinking and the five points of "modern archi­tec­ture," which he listed in 1927 when the­o­rizing about the fun­da­mental prin­ci­ples of the modern move­ment: the pil­ings, the roof-garden, the free plan, the long window and the free façade, were made pos­sible in par­tic­ular by the use of con­crete. Euridice Zaituna Kala imag­ines that this work could have been inspired by Le Corbusier’s love affair with Josephine Baker [21]. The two met in 1929, on a cruise from Bordeaux to São Paulo.