The places we inhabit often continue to inhabit us. Monika Emmanuelle Kazi's practice revives domestic spaces and family memories nurtured by a diasporic experience between Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo, where she grew up, and Paris.
SAT 19.09: Opening Reception Radio Nova invites the public to continue the evening at the CCS platform with two concerts. Free entry from 20:00 + With Shifting Ground, the artist transforms the CCS into an architecture traversed by memories. A structure of mobile wall panels occupies the space. The walls become projection surfaces where family narratives, childhood traces, and broader stories linked to colonial legacies, economic exchanges, and flows of materials and raw resources emerge. At the heart of the project lies a particular attention to building materials and what they tell. Cement, introduced to the African continent during the colonial period to build 'solid', gradually replaced vernacular materials better suited to local climates. By hindering the natural circulation of air and moisture, it causes condensations and halos to appear on walls, which Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reinterprets as drawings or crystallizations of memory. Conversely, tropical woods exported to Europe reappear in her works as marquetries, revealing other circulations of materials, values, and stories. The title Shifting Ground evokes both mobility, instability, and the moisture of soil in perpetual transformation, inscribing its mobile furniture installation in this same ecosystem. Composed of mobile wooden panels, it is traversed by details, traces, and layers of memory. By piercing the wall panels, the artist reveals their framework and allows sand to flow through the gaps. Pyrography, marquetries of sapele (Congo mahogany) and wallpaper fragments inscribe intimate and transcontinental narratives in this shifting architecture.
Fee: Free entry
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Monika Emmanuelle Kazi, 2022