Artists and memory of slavery: Resistance, creative freedom and legacies
Romuald Mevo Guezo, Golgotha. Photo Placide Tossou Charles © UNESCO
SEMINAR, EXHIBITION AND PERFORMANCE AT UNESCO PARIS
Martin Luther King, in a speech he addressed at Berlin Jazz Festival, pointed out that: “When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument”. The civil right activist further acknowledged that “Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music.
It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down”.
The creative action has a liberating power: it enables to disconnect from the infernal cycles of exploitation and offers spaces for a breath, for recreation and re-humanization through language, body performance, chant, rhythms, spirituality… The creative process in the arts further allows the overcoming of the condition of victim in order to “no longer be a slave of slavery” as Frantz Fanon has put it.
Generations of artists have, ever since the abolitions of slavery, seized, revisited, rehabilitated, and transmitted, when their turn came, these esthetic legacies in diverse areas of creation. They have also taken over the historical, political, social, and identity questions inherited from colonial history as to draw new horizons to individual and intercultural relations.
To address these issues, UNESCO Slave Route Project along with the cultural association "Fait à Cuba" and Vallois gallery organize an event from 4 to 11 September in Paris consisting of a seminar, an exhibition and a performance. These activities will be offering a plural reflection on the relation that contemporary artists hold to the history and memory of slavery.
- How does this tragic history, still ill-known on the scientific field of research and marginalized by the media, feed artistic creation in its most contemporary forms?
- Does artistic creation enable to voice and crystallize new viewpoints on this complex phenomenon as well as to generate unprecedented overcomings?
- How do artists draw inspiration from, refer to, and carry this painful memory but also transcend it so as to achieve universality?
For more information :
- Concept note on the event;
- Programme and Participants of the seminar “Artists and the memory of slavery: resistance, creative freedom and legacies”;
- Catalogue of the exhibition "Temps modernes".
