Disobedient Matter is the third exhibition co-curated by Olivier Marboeuf for Montreal’s Af-flux : Biennale Transnationale Noire, titled Mille chemins d’humanité. At OBORO, he explores the paradox of the visibility of black communities in spaces of globalized art, and the risk of black bodies once again becoming the raw materials of an economy that both overexposes and exhausts them. In response to this injunction to be present, the invited artists all work with techniques ranging from costume and video to installation, sound and photography, constructing strategies of ruse and of elusive, fleeting presences.

In this way, they thwart expected images, forging secret forms of alliance, summoning carnivalesque codes to celebrate the meeting of the human with the powers of the world and of catastrophe (Gwladys Gambie, Ludgi Savon). They also invent legends and other digital avatars (Mawena Yehouessi). Tradition is not frozen in the past; it is by drawing on the art of weaving (Diane Cescutti) or lullabies (Myriam Omar Awadi) that these artists renew a coded language capable of resisting the colonial violence and looting of yesterday and today. The exhibition merges with the present-future of Afrofuturism. A fragment of the Bouba Touré archive and the sound work Le Musée du Souffle (Olivier Marboeuf & al) remind us that black temporalities are spirals in which history repeats itself, always differently.

Bouba Touré (1948-2022) lived in Paris and Somankidi Coura, Mali. He moved to France in 1965. He later studied at the University of Vincennes and became a projectionist in a Paris cinema. A photographer since the 1970s, he documented the lives and struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and Mali. In the 1980s, Touré exhibited his work and gave lectures. His photographic work was presented at Rencontres de Bamako 2019 and at the Hamburg Triennial of Photography 2022. From 2006, Touré and Raphaël Grisey worked together on collaborative projects including “Semer Somankidi Coura, une archive générative”. Their feature film Xarassi Xanne won several awards in 2022 at the Cinéma du Réel festival, the Tarifa African Film Festival, Monde en vues and Archivio Aperto.

The Archive Bouba Touré
Raphaël Grisey and the Departmental archives of Seine Saint Denis are today coordinating with Bouba Touré’s family and a wider circle of friends, the inventory work and the dissemination of the Bouba Touré archive, which brings together thousands of photographs, films, manuscripts. A large selection from newly digitized photographs negatives from the Bouba Touré archives, as well as the film Xaraasi Xanne (Les Voix Croisés) will be presented in the exhibition.

Transmission noire – Mille chemins d’humanité
Afflux #2
Biennale Transnationale Noire

A proposal by Olivier Marboeuf and Moridja Kitenge Banza

with Mawena Yehouessi, Guy Wouete, Stanley Wany, Bouba Touré, Ludgi Savon, Emmanuel Osahor, Myriam Omar Awadi, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Michèle Magema, Po B. K. Lomami​, Mathieu Lacroix, Audrey et Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Délio Jasse, Astrid Gonzalez Quintero, Gwladys Gambie, Marie-Danielle Duval, Collectif Musée du Souffle, Louis Chude Sokei​, Diane Cescutti​, Giscard Bouchotte, Anna Binta Diallo, Héritier Bilaka, Ajamu X

Related Publication

Sowing Somankidi Coura
A Generative Archive

2017

Archive Books