Creation is a movement from a wound

Who am I? I am an artist because I found the best way to address the question of mankind is through art. I could have been a philosopher. My sense of physicality makes me interested by theory, but also sensitive to practice. I go back and forth between theory and practice.

“WHY DO I DO ART?”

It’s one of the pillars of why I do what I do. When I was at the gymnasium – how do you call it in English? – college. I thought about politics, but I don’t think you change society on day one. It’s a long process.

For that, art is the last space of what we call in philosophy – individuation. Individuation come from the individual. Individuation transformed the notion of individual as a noun into a verb. It’s a movement. We as individuals exchange traces or data or impression and we build together a collective individual. This collective individual is the society.


When I was in Kochi, last January, before I had even applied for the Kochi Biennale, I wanted to see the biennale because I like the region of Kerala, I love India, but also it was the perfect timing for me to visit. I came with my family after the opening. I wanted to see it after the art crowd had left.

It was packed with the locals, the young, the elders, 95–98% Indian, and for me it was important because I discovered how much this exhibition has an impact on the population.

What is the crucial stake of this relation between an exhibition and the public? Knowledge.

Knowledge about the other, but knowledge about yourself. Let’s talk about the Kochi Biennale because it’s a good example. It’s what I hope will save humanity from the vanishing physical experience we need as humans. Humans are social animals. They are moved by the gregarious instinct to be together.

The fragmentation and polarisation of society because of social media is isolating us, enhancing individualism, narcissism that is putting the evolution of the human society in danger.

You’re not going to change the hundreds of people visiting the biennale. But maybe you’re going to change a small number of young people, probably children, too – let’s say, five per cent. (The biennale) had 700,000 visitors, so 5% of 700,000 visitors is 35,000. This is good seed for the future.

EAST VS WEST

I curated the Berlin Biennale (in 2022). I live in Berlin; I know the city. The Berlin Biennale has to do with criterions that are endemic to the city – the population is half coming from the former communist side, and the other from the more capitalist side. Plus you mix the migrants who arrived because of these influences – from former communist countries like Vietnam and from Eastern Europe, and then Americans, Israelis. A lot of Syrians and Pales tinians too nowadays. It’s a mixed crowd. To create a biennale in Berlin was a question of mirroring the context where you create.

When you asked me about where I will retire and I said the (global) South, but then I also said that the journey is what shapes my personality. In Kochi, this notion of journey is embedded to the place. It’s printed into the layers.

I put Kochi Biennale on top of the list of the (best) biennales because it has this jenesais quoi which makes it not only Kochi-Muziris city’s biennale or Kerala’s, but also a local and international biennale – connected through the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, to the Union Island, to Saudi Arabia, with Jeddah, to many other places. Kochi is a model of a city that reflects what Edouard Glissant, the Caribbean poet, has defined as creolity. In the 21st century, you are born in a culture, you live in another culture, and you die in a third culture

When you ask me, where will you be retired? Not in Nigeria or France. I’m very much into this creolity, and in Kochi I felt it.

ART FROM NOTHING

I curated Berlin Biennale in a country that had never heard of Indian Dalit art. Through my research, I discovered collectives such as the secular movement. The secular movement has all these people who are well known now, but when I brought them to the Berlin Biennale, they were unknown. What touched me in this collective is that it was not about a religion or an ideology. It was about Dalits trying to create their own space to show work to the other Dalit people who have no access to contemporary art. I went several times to India. And I discovered a kind of energy in these artists, who were using found material, creating a critique of different topics without saying it – critique of casteism, of capitalism. What interested me with this emerging art scene is how much artists, particularly when they don’t have means, can create out of nothing. Extra ordinary installation, political, with few things, with few means.

It’s an example as a professor to share with students. The students have no money, some of them live in deep precarity. I’m always saying it’s better when you have a lot of means to create a gigantic installation. But a lack of means should not stop your creation. Through art history... Andre Mason – so many painters in the ’30s in Europe, the avant-garde, had nothing. Max Ernst painted with beeswax when he lived in a farm.

That’s why the emerging art scene means a form of creativity that comes from a strong desire to make it with or without the economy of means

Needless to say, it’s not only about the visual vocabulary. There is an ethical gesture of re-appropriation of the position from where as an artist you have been withdrawn. So you re- appropriate the sovereignty on interpreting the world as you want.

Let me give you an example. In Bombay, there is this incredible slum that always shocked me. I visited Dharavi in 2005. They were recycling everything. Of course, these conditions are horrible and it’s a tough life. But at that time, I was interested by the notion of reappropriation – recycling, repairing, fixing

Art is about that. Creation is a movement from a wound into something that is productive. And this movement does not necessarily need a lot of means. It needs creativity and it needs desire. It’s a project of life.