Magalie Mobetie
Anba tè, adan kò - Installation - 2021
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 23 - ...par le rêve...
Installation
“I was looking for souls that we had lost. I was rummaging in my body for replicas of a gene provoking taciturn generations. I was frightened by my verbal outpouring, frightened of the burdens I’d bring down. But your earth, Papa Jean, is a land of love and your children have always celebrated it.” Going out to see her family in Guadeloupe, Magalie tries to shatter the culture of silence. The history of slavery and its trade has not been passed on. It is not a subject of conversation. What happens with this accumulation of things unspoken? The voices and ghostly doubles of nine parents are placed under a tree, a clear reference to the family tree, but not only that, for there is also a Tree of Forgetting. Evoking the idea of a trauma that must be repressed, echoing research in epigenetics and psychogenealogy, Magalie wants to go in the other direction around the tree and invites spectators to do the same, not in order to forget, but to know and to share.
30 November 1848. Seven months after slavery was abolished in Guadeloupe, Louisonne, Alexandre and their children stood before a registrar in the town of Lamentin in Guadeloupe and were given the name ‘Mobétie’. This administrative record, found by Magalie Mobetie three generations later, has become one of the guiding threads around which her family and her work now weave a link between past, present and future.
A multimedia artist combining visual arts, video, sound, 3D and immersive technologies, Magalie Mobetie is interested in what is left unsaid, unseen and the reasons for silence in families. Trained at Le Fresnoy - National Studio of Contemporary Arts (2020-2022 - Tourcoing, France) and then resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2023-2024 - Maastricht, Netherlands), she has developed a transdisciplinary practice in which she assumes the role of ‘future ancestor’, transforming inherited legacies into conscious transmissions.
Since 2023, she has been teaching in the Digital Humanities Master’s programme at the Université Polytechnique des Hauts-de-France. Her approach is part of a critical and exploratory thinking about the diversion of digital tools and extended realities to think beyond entertainment.
