ARTAFRICAYou define yourself as a ‘hypermedia’ artist – what does that mean?
Hypermedia is a reference to hypertext. It means that I work in a wide range of media, establishing
multidirectional hyperlinks between their properties and symbols – material and conceptual. As
Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is indeed also the message. I am not only interested
in what is multidimensional, but in what is ‘hyperdimensional,’ like the notion of hyperspace and
quantum physics. That’s why I like to mix and remix elements from very different corpora, which
results in works that have “variable geometry.”
For instance, in my ‘Electrofetishes’ series, which are deliberately anti-exotic and anti-folkloric, I
remix Beninese culture with the bocio (ritual statuettes) and French culture with the readymade. I
add NFC (near field communication) chips that allow the works to actually exchange energy with the
viewer, or rather the ‘experiencer.’ The same is true of my ‘Vodunaut’ series, in which I use cowry
shells, but once again to refer simultaneously to their history as a currency and to their paradoxical
symbolism as a visual marker of Africa, even though they are very rarely found in Africa itself. The
symbol that they represent and the fact that I love to use them as a material comes from the fact
that they embody the value of the ‘Elsewhere,’ the transcultural value of luck and the notion of a
point of view (since they can be seen as an eye, a mouth or a vagina). They are a far more complex
visual symbol than one first thinks. In this series, I hyperlink this seme to other semantic networks by
incorporating smartphones that display a video series of mine, called ‘e-canvasses,’ made of seamless
video loops that stand between photography and video. I filmed this series on four continents. Each
video contains references to classic painters (Canaletto, for example) but also to silent cinema. The
fact that I use smartphones also implies that I can, in the future, remotely modify the pieces, extend
or change the videos or add interactive elements such as movement detection. The electronically
connected component allows me to create works that are virtually in constant evolution.
Your work is built upon the concept of contexture, the creation of which is driven by three
processes: pulse, improvisation and collective participation. How do these elements manifest
in your video piece Kaleta/Kaleta (shown at the official opening of THAT ART FAIR) and
in your other works?
In the case of Kaleta/Kaleta, the pulse is the uniform tempo of one hundred and thirty-three beats per
minute, to which the sounds, music and video are all synchronised.
The word Kaleta refers to a tradition created in Benin by freed Afro-Brazilians who came back to
Ouidah (Benin) during the nineteenth century. The Kaleta tradition is a unique mix of European
and Brazilian carnival and American Halloween that includes Abomey’s (the capital of Danhomè
kingdom) Zinli dance moves among other Beninese traditional dances. This mix genuinely embodies
the specific Beninese talent for syncretism. Born from the wounds of the slave trade, this tradition is
far from being any sort of lamentation. On the contrary, it is a tribute to resilience. Not only to human
resilience but also to cultural resilience, because this tradition is passed on exclusively by children. It
represents children’s unique capacity to transmute horror into joy through play and transformation.
THAT ART FAIR / IN CONVERSATION WITH EMO DE MEDEIROS 6/22
FEATURE / THAT ART FAIR