As part of the second edition of the Archipel#Chaos-Monde Biennale, Précy Numbi is offering a week-long creative workshop centered on the Éco-Maskés, culminating in a final presentation at CWB|Paris.
Led by Belgian-Congolese eco-futurist artist Precy Numbi, the Éco-Maskés workshop explores how materials that most people see as waste or scrap can be given new potential. Plastics, electronic components, metals, manufactured fragments, and abandoned objects are repurposed to create singular figures that are simultaneously costumes, armor, presences, and extensions of the self. Freed from their status as waste, these materials re-enter a cycle of circulation in which they regain the ability to act, tell stories, and forge connections. They become repositories of memories, journeys, and experiences that can be collectively reactivated. Precy Numbi’s approach forms part of a broader reflection combining resilience, repair, and environmental awareness. Informed by cross-border journeys and close attention to the stories held within objects, his work views every salvaged item as a silent witness to our habits, our movements, and the production systems that shape how we inhabit the world. Throughout the sessions, participants are invited to develop their own figures and invent silhouettes that embody stories, contemporary mythologies, and imagined futures. The workshop also draws on the ancestral functions of the mask as a tool for gathering, transmission, and collective healing. Reinterpreted in a world marked by ecological crises and technological change, the mask becomes an agent of transformation, enabling us to imagine other forms of coexistence and new ways of inhabiting the living world. Through this experience, issues relating to overproduction, resource depletion, and the global circulation of materials are approached not through guilt, but as starting points for developing new forms of responsibility, vigilance, and reclamation. The aim is less to condemn than to make another reading of what has been abandoned possible, revealing the potential for transformation contained at the margins of our societies. Conceived as a space for learning and empowerment, Les Éco-Maskés celebrates experimentation, mutual support, and a diversity of experiences. The works produced temporarily become part of the universe developed by the artist: a borderless eco-futurist Republic populated by resilient figures, healing presences, and stories capable of connecting multiple social, cultural, and geographical realities. The week will conclude with a public activation of the completed works. Taking over the spaces of the Centre and the surrounding area, participants will bring an ephemeral community to life, whose appearances will transform the final presentation into a contemporary ritual of reclamation, sharing, and collective celebration. The masks and adornments created during the workshop will then become the vehicles of a living aesthetic in which the act of repair merges with the invention of new ways of being together. ■ Participatory workshops from September 21 to 25 From 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., then from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. throughout the week Final collaborative roaming performance on September 25 (time to be announced) 15 participants Registration and information: [email protected]
Admission: Registration and information: [email protected]
Source: paris.fr — photo: DR