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 are quoted or evoked, forming a mesh of personal and historical references from the intimate sphere of the artist.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)
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)
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
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.
[1] Sylvie Perrault, “Danseuse(s) noire(s) au music-hall la permanence d’un stéréotype”, Corps, n°3, 2007/2, p. 65-72. URL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-corps-dilecta-2007-2-page-65.htm
[2] Marie Canet, “Wild”, Initiales, n°13, 2019, p.26.
[3] Cité dans Pauline Guedj, “Le recul nécessaire : James Baldwin en France”, France-Afrique [en ligne], 4 juin 2020. URL: https://france-amerique.com/fr/perspective-through-exile-james-baldwin-in-france/
[4] Femi Lewis, “Women of the Black Arts Movement”, ThoughtCo [en ligne], 30 mai 2019. URL : https://www.thoughtco.com/women-of-the-black-arts-movement-45167
[5] [The] artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people….Otherwise I don’t know why you do it.” in James Campbell, “Revolution Song”, The Guardian [en ligne], 4 août 2007. URL : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview12
[6] Nathalie Coutelet, « Féral Benga », Cahiers d’études africaines [En ligne], 205 | 2012, mis en ligne le 03 avril 2014. URL :https://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/16995#bodyftn1
[7] Nathalie Coutelet, “Féral Benga”, ACHAC/ Artistes de France [en ligne]. URL : https://www.achac.com/artistes-de-france/feral-benga/
[8] Voir Zoe Guy, “In Homecoming, Beyoncé Makes Beychella Personal”, Hyperallergic [en ligne], 2 mai 2019. URL: https://hyperallergic.com/498113/beyonce-homecoming-netflix-coachella/
[9] Dances of Haiti, écrit en 1937 a d’abord été publié en espagnol : Las danzas de Haiti, Acta antropológica 2.4, Mexico, 1947 puis en français : Les danses d’Haïti, Éditions Fasquelles, Paris, 1950.
[10] Julie Dekens, “Rester aux Enfers : le bonheur paradoxal d’Eurydice”, TRANS- [En ligne], 17 | 2014, mis en ligne le 24 février 2014, consulté le 29 juillet 2020. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/trans/910
[11] Jean-Marie Drot et Dominique Polad-Hardouin, Les Heures chaudes de Montparnasse, Paris, Hazan, 1995, p.118
[12] L’un des biographes de Le Corbusier, Nicholas Fox Weber, n’utilise pas le conditionnel : « Le Corbusier pouvait être despotique et méchant, mais Joséphine Baker, avec qui il eut une courte liaison, le trouvait ‘gai et simple’ et le décrivait comme ‘un homme de cœur’. » (Nicholas Fox Weber, “Le Corbusier, un personnage complexe qui prête à la polémique”, Le Monde, 22 juillet 2015. URL :
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2015/07/22/le-corbusier-un-personnage-complexe-qui-prete-a-la-polemique_4694041_3232.html)
[13] Ibid.
[15] Sous ce terme, il faut entendre art africain mais aussi océanien, voire malgache. Cette dénomination s’inscrit d’une part dans un contexte colonial, d’autre part, on peut y voir, comme Benoît de l’Estoile, le reflet d’une lecture ethnocentrique, teintée du racisme des théories évolutionnistes, associant “race nègre”, “primitivisme” et origine de l’art.
[16] Un texte inaugural “Niam n’goura ou la raison d’être de Présence Africaine” explique clairement les objectifs de la revue : “publier des études africanistes sur la culture et la civilisation noire” ; “publier des textes africains” ; “passer en revue les « œuvres d’art ou de pensée concernant le monde noir”. Voir Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura ou la raison d’être de Présence Africaine”, Présence Africaine 2002/1-2 (N° 165-166), p.19-25.
[17] Christine Eyene, “ Gérard Sekoto : symptômes d’exil et questions d’interprétation”, africultures [en ligne], 30 septembre 2006. URL: http://africultures.com/gerard-sekoto-symptomes-de-lexil-et-questions-dinterpretation-4608/
[20] Voir Pascal Blanchard, “De la Vénus hottentote aux formes abouties de l’exhibition ethnographique et colonial : Les étapes d’un long processus (1810-1940)”, dans La Vénus Hottentote : Entre Barnum et Muséum, Paris, Publications scientifiques du Muséum, 2013, p.35-63. Cet article replace le cas de la Vénus Hottentote dans un contexte plus large et critique, et donne des précisions biographiques quant à la vie de Sawtche en Europe.
[21] Voir l’essai de Anne Anlin Cheng, “Les peaux, les tatouages et l’attrait de la surface” (dans Initiales, n°13, 2019, p.101-105), qui tisse des liens entre l’architecture moderniste - notamment la notion de “peau” et les théories architecturales d’Adolf Loos sur l’ornement -, et la figure de Joséphine Baker ; entre “peau noire et surface moderne”. Elle y fait également l’analyse de la maison dessinée par Loos pour Baker, qu’elle décrit comme une “vision architecturale [qui] illustre les fantasmes raciaux et sexuels du désir européen, masculin et primitiviste”, une maison-théâtre non pas pensée pour le “divertissement de Baker, mais [pour] le divertissement Baker”.
Partager