Secteur IX, B is a video work rooted in Michel Leiris' "L'Afrique fantôme". What was meant to be a historiographer's work on the Dakar-Djibouti mission became a diary of an observer asserting his subjectivity as an ethnographer and man of letters. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc has seized upon Leiris' freedom of writing to address the question of the accuracy of scientific discourse. Betty, the protagonist of Secteur IX, B and a researcher working on the memory of the mission, embodies the artist's interest in writing about the relationships between peoples, their objects and their archives. The complexity of memory work emerges in this video work through the researcher's gestures and emotions, as well as through the prism of museums and their collections, which constitute both a desired impartial heritage and biases in a culture. Keeping "neither too far nor too close" says Betty, understanding the foundations of a culture without influencing its actors, grasping cultural identity to avoid collective amnesia - these are all issues of anthropology and postcolonial studies with which Secteur IX, B is steeped.

Exhibitions