Super happy that my video Sorcières, video, animation 3D, 2019 is exhibited in APPARITIONS : an online exhibition of dis-possession The livestream occur and loop on Halloween night October 31, 2020 8:30 PM EST – midnight twitch.tv/apparitions2020
What is a witch today? Mix of 3D animation (Iclone7) and sounds and videos from the march poitevin, created in the frame of an artistic residency in Melle, Nouvelle Aquitaine, 2019
The discovery of the marsh in winter was a chance for me, because even though I could appreciate the beauty in spring, the gnarled branches of tadpoles ash whose roots hold the banks, in winter reflected in the water were the perfect setting for my images … I loved making shots of these branches reflected upside down in the water and giving a very strange dimension to this finally civilized nature. There were no witch stories so I tried to “take out” the swamp witch through the pictures. The marsh became the main character, with a witch in the background, which I then created from scratch in 3D. So that the marsh and its inhabitants, the trees, the birds, the wind and the sounds of the water brewed by the boats, can remain in the front of the stage, I registered while whispering texts, influenced by the readings of the moment: Women running with Clarissa’s wolves Pinkola Estes, Witches of Mona Chollet, Words, Death, Spells of Jeanne Favret Saada, etc. and especially by my desire more and more urgent to say the importance of freeing oneself from all yokes: capitalist, patriarchal, political, etc.
APPARITIONS is an aching archive in the form of an online exhibition.
This exhibition was manifested out of exhaustion and out of love. Drawing from our individual and shared experiences, Ellery and Zelikha have felt continually invalidated in the cis-normative compulsorily-hetero white supremacist academic complex of objective hegemony. We find that institutions of research uphold the quantification and categorization of transcendent realities and embodied knowledges. The reductionist thinking of “study” devalues sensory, bodily, emotional, queer, marginalized, multiplicitous and experiential methods.
We need to summon and release, give our bodies respite, and remain open to the unknown. The intangible is an inhabitable continuum that guides us in envisioning our futures. This is a space for expanding and preserving sensual residues. We rewire togetherness, we are reaching through.
Informed by a diasporic framework and Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, APPARITIONS emphasizes the sensory; disconnection from body, land, heritage, ancestors, and history; and repressed history and memory.
with love, co-curators Zelikha Shoja and Ellery Bryan
“This is an aching archive—the one that contains all of our growing grief, all of our dispossessed longing for the bodies that were once among us and have gone over to the side that we will go to too. When I told you that I will probably haunt you, you made it about you, but it is about me. The opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.
…haunting is a materializing. Haunting is a mattering…”
– Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective “Before Disposession, or Surviving It…”
This exhibition was made possible with the love and support of our friends and communities in Central New York and Baltimore. Syracuse University’s VPA Graduate Student Memorial Grant contributed funds to support this exhibition.
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