Remembering to Reinvent One’s Future

At the end of the 1960s, I was doing representational painting in black and white; I had eliminated color out of an effort for more simplicity.

At the beginning of the 1970s, in the context of the Nancy World Festival of University Theater, I saw a representation by Bread and Puppet titled Our Domestic Resurrection. That theater group, based in New York, was working militantly against the Vietnam War. Each representation was a sort of ritual ceremony; huge white dolls were mounted and sent out in the middle of the spectators in a gesture fraught with gravity. The representation ended with the sharing of bread. I was impressed by the strong emotion produced by this show. I decided to stop painting. I made little white dolls with pieces of used sheets; I arranged them in a collection of cigar boxes spray painted black. On white canvas, I created scenes with dolls and different black objects: a torn folder, a baby’s swaddling cloth, and so on. I also made wooden structures in which to arrange them: cases, boxes, bags to move them to the different exhibition sites. In those years, it was a matter of contestation, of challenging the old order, of illustrating, of showing a rigid, closed, normalizing society concerned with maintaining the established order so that everyone stays in their place as if under house arrest and becomes a docile consumer. The architecture, the construction of the structures became more and more important, and more complex, to the point that the dolls disappeared. This architecture, covered with black dust, became the principal object of my reflections; I was in the presence of construction remnants like an archaeologist exhuming elements from the past, that of my personal and collective memory. I was overcome by nostalgia, nostalgia for times past. Certain pieces had as titles The Laurels Are Cut . . . , If Christopher Columbus . . . , His Name of Babylon in Deserted New York; this period ended with the production of black bags containing rows of little sealed drawers that were meant to conserve the memory of our somber history.

NO, 1982. Against wood veneer, mounted on brown wrapping paper, 100 x 50 x 9 cm. Photograph by Sylvestre Chatenay. © Alex Burke ADAGP

Untitled, 1978. Compartments against wood veneer, cloth dolls, 150 x 100 x 9 cm. Photograph by Sylvestre Chatenay. © Alex Burke ADAGP

At the beginning of the 1980s, I blew on the layer of black dust, dust of time. New works appeared: collections of hand forms and diverse objects that composed sorts of altarpieces in mostly blue and gold, treasures exhumed from nothingness. These altarpieces dedicated to unknown gods were a metaphorical way to bring forth the past and to recall and remember that the world does not start with Christopher Columbus, does not start with the destruction of one part of humanity.

For a long time, I was torn between the urgent necessity of producing protest work, of warning about the new world of which we are a veritable laboratory, and the desire to let the little boy on the beach express himself. So, between the two, irony and derision took hold. Often, I give up—associating the work with the material and tools necessary for its creation, thumbing my nose at academic culture.

At the end of the 1980s, I returned to the practice of drawing, at first with minimalist work, furtive, hesitant lines, faltering attempts to trap physical and mental space, approaching the void of nothing and everything. Drawing joined the protest in a legible form, human forms, traces of black china ink on envelopes—supports that evoke separation, absence, distance, exile, displacement.

A thousand of those envelopes crossed the Atlantic Ocean, from Gorée Island in Senegal to twenty-one countries in the Americas. About six hundred of them survived and arrived at their destinations. They were grouped in order to form an exhibit titled In Memory of Gorée, at Nantes, at the Temple du Goût, a private hotel that was once owned by a man who was part of...