For a few days this week, filmmaker Alice Diop has created a space for healing. For this year’s Miu Miu commission during Art Basel Paris, she has transformed the Place d’Iéna into a large-scale installation title Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation).
The journey begins with Zanele Muholi’s Bona, Charlottesville, Virginia (2015), from the “Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness)” series. In the black-and-white photograph, we see the artist looking at themself in a mirror, but her face is only visible through their reflection. Beyond this is a new film by Diop, title [Sans titres], which begins with excerpts from ethnographic films of African women, depicted as the other, and ending with shots that show empowered Black women.
Further along is “Chambre à soi” (Living Room and Library), which Diop describes as a “living room for a thinking Black woman—a space of pause, learning and encounter. Libraries have long been quietly radical spaces of Black political imagination.” In a space modeled after Diop’s own office, with rugs inspired by the visual motifs of Gee’s Bend quilter Mary Lee Bendolph, visitors can take time to read through books by Christina Sharpe, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet and peruse monographs on Otobong Nkanga, Deana Lawson, Henry Taylor, Chantal Akerman, Mona Hatoum, Jacqueline de Jong, Marcel Duchamp, and more.
Between the “Chambre à soi” and Simone Leigh’s towering 2020–21 sculpture Sentinel (Mami Wata), which concludes the journey, is a performance space, whose offerings will alternate between an embodied performance Angel Bat Dawid and the Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty and Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique, a 40-minute durational piece in which two performers (from a group of six) will read different excerpts from foundational texts for Diop and Beugré as a call and response. Listening to the words of Saidiya Hartman, Gayl Jones, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and others is a much-needed reprieve for the hustle and bustle of this week in Paris.
To learn more about Geste de Consolation, ARTnews spoke with Diop via a translator.
This interview has been lightly edited.
ARTnews: How did the commissions for Fragments for Venus and then Geste de Consolation come together? Had you met Miuccia Prada prior to the invitation?
Alice Diop: I had no relationship with Miuccia Prada before I received an invitation from Verde Visconti to propose a project for the “Women’s Tales” series, and so that was Fragments for Venus. I met Mrs. Prada when Fragments was shown in Venice, and a few months ago, she offered me—to my great surprise—to be the invited artist for the public commission that Miu Miu has done for the last years during Art Basel Paris. I was stunned, but I decided to trust the intuition of this woman whom I greatly admire. I was glad that I did so because it really took me someplace different than I’ve been with the work that I’ve done in the past. With this project, I decided to stay true to the research that has inhabited me, haunted me, and that I have given shape to in Fragments. This research has to do with the questions that arise for me from the representation of Black women in art history, and I think this exhibition is a prolongation, a culmination, and perhaps the end of my research into these questions. It was really beautiful for me to be able to put in dialogue very specific objects that I chose for the exhibition and this venue.
Speaking about the representation of Black women in art history and in visual culture more generally, can you talk about the use of ethnographic films of African women in the short film, [Sans titres], that you made for Geste de Consolation?
I come from a background that is largely in ethnographic film or related to ethnographic film and anthropology. At university, I studied anthropology and history, and that’s what led me to cinema. The images that we see at the beginning of my video installation are ones that were found by a film archivist that I hired to look for them in the preparation for my next feature film, which is going to be an adaptation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa, a text which is really the foundation of French anthropology and contemporary anthropology. It also reveals the extent to which this this dawning discipline in the 1930s was related to colonial domination and how anthropology and anthropological studies were the expression of a will to capture the other. So, this brilliant archivist who worked with me found these images from French, German, and Italian anthropological expeditions. [Sans titres] also includes excerpts from the [project funded] by Albert Kahn [The Archives of the Planet] to early Lumière films. There are also some private archival images, and some films from the 1930s, like Voyage au Congo (Voyage to the Congo). And so, what it really provides is a panorama of these types of images from the beginning of the 20th century to the middle of the 20th century, and I think that they reveal a collective imagination of the other. My gaze as a filmmaker has been developed against them. The way these images show and stage Black women tells me how I’ve been constructed and reveal how I became a filmmaker, to a large degree, to clean and heal myself.
Then, toward the end of the video installation, you have what I call images of consolation. These are images of care, and they include a variety of sources such as Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de… [1966], a film by Sarah Maldoror called Sambizanga [1972]. There are some more recent images like from a film by Rosine Mbakam, Les prières de Delphine (Delphine’s Prayers) [2021]. There are images from a Chris Marker film, which are more ambiguous, and then you have images from Pedro Costa’s film Vitalina Varela [2019]. These are all appearances of Black women on film who are shown with respect and dignity—images that helped me to heal and helped me to make more precise my own gaze as a filmmaker.
This reminds me of the second half of Fragments for Venus, where you focus on different Black women in Brooklyn. Do you see that part of the film as a form of healing that also adds to the visual archive of the representation of Black women?
Yes, absolutely. The pleasure I took in in doing this, and my primary intention in looking at these women, was looking at them the way I would have liked to be looked at when I was developing my gaze as a filmmaker.
In both Fragments for Venus and your feature film Saint Omer, you use music minimally but precisely. In [Sans Titre], there’s music throughout the film. Why did you choose to approach the film’s score this way?
This is the first time I worked with a composer and had someone compose original music for one of my projects. It was really a tremendous pleasure that will certainly inspire me for my future films. I worked with Angel Bat Dawid and Naima Nefertari, whose album Journey to Nabta Playa really haunted the writing of my next feature film. I had used a piece from that album in early versions of the edit of this installation, and I felt that I wanted to do something more organic.
I think it was the right instinct to have Angel and Naima come in and work on this film because there was a very tricky question about how to use these images, including how to expose Black women to these images. I didn’t want to show them this violence again in a way that was going to hurt them. This was a very tricky question, and I found that the only way to do it was actually for music to give us the point of view on how I wanted these images to be looked at. The resulting music is [a recording of] Black women looking at these images, crying, praying, consoling, avenging—and that’s really what happened. Naima and Angel came to the studio with me. We set up the screens. The three of us watched the images together. We cried, and then they composed in a very organic way to the image. It was like a live film concert—they performed live to these archival images. It was a tremendously powerful experience. Then the next day, I edited the music to the image, but [there was] very little editing, because, again, it was so organic. The relationship between the voice, the crying, the calling out of Angel and her clarinet and Naima’s piano—it was so accurate. It made me realize that this was actually the only voiceover possible, and it was the only way to confront viewers with these images.
How did you approach the architecture of the Place d’Iéna for the commission, and how does that relate to the Zanele Muholi and Simone Leigh works, as well as the performance program?
Well, it’s like a trajectory or a path. What is important is that there was precise attention devoted to each object that’s exhibited. At the same time, I wanted to allow visitors freedom to move from one space to another. It really is a path from the photo to the sculpture. I can’t predict what visitors are going to experience because it’s very personal. But the idea is that it’s a kind of narrative path toward care, toward healing. The relationship between each of these objects that appear along a very considered trajectory is precise. We start with Zanele’s photo, which I think of as the point of view that I’d like people to have toward the images, and then the installation space with the video is the space of violence and raises the need for consolation. Then we have the performance space where these women just come out of the frame and are totally themselves. They claim the right to be themselves, and suddenly we have them there in all their beauty and all their power.