Taking its cues from the installation Walking through the Arawak Horizon, for Wilson Harris and moving towards the making of a new feature film, the conversation between Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and Silvia Franceschini will follow various strands of the artist's research and practice across moving image, music and literature. 

             Walking through the Arawak Horizon, for Wilson Harris digs into the different types of exchanges that existed and still exist along the Maroni River, which forms the natural border between French Guiana and Suriname. This border has stood witness to many struggles, explorations and exploitations starting from the creation of the first maroon communities in the 18^th century, to the later migration of West-Indian creoles in search of gold, up until the current threat to the many native Amerindian communities that are still living up the river. These communities are suffering from water contamination by the mercury which is illegally used for gold washing, poisoning their water and food supplies and leading to soil degradation and deforestation.

             Abonnenc’s research addresses colonial and neocolonial toxicity through an auto-ethnographic account which intertwines personal and collective history and gives voice to multiple worldviews from the Caribbean and the Amazon basin. His installations and films are guided by the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, who worked throughout his poetic and philosophical career to craft a singular ecological and decolonial vision based on the confrontation of environmental issues with emancipation from the colonial fracture. According to Harris, the landscape possesses resonance and life because it is “like an open book written in an alphabet which we could each decipher […] But it takes some time to grasp what this alphabet really is.”

             This event connects to the presentation of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s Walking through the Arawak Horizon, for Wilson Harris in the exhibition Le Déracinement. On Diasporic Imagination, which is on view at Z33 House for Contemporary Art Design and Architecture in Hasselt until Sunday 16^th May 2021.

             Watch Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s film Wacapou, a Prologue or A Room in My Mother's House here. 

             The film describes the artist's search for the home once owned by his family in the small village of Wacapou, on the Maroni River. The wooden house was sold to Abonnenc’s mother in 1984 by Joseph Bernes, a former gold digger from Saint Lucia, but was never lived in by his family because of the civil war that broke out in Suriname in 1986. Abonnenc gives pictorial shape to his fragile memory of the house by combining photographs taken in the 1980s by anthropologist Michel- Baj Strobel and Abonnenc’s mother, with archival materials and his own footage of the lush rainforest that took over the guilding in recent years – and the latter’s powerful sonic environment. The artist follows the traces of the region’s Creole gold mining communities from the beginning of the 20th century to their descendants who still live there today.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Wacapou, a Prologue or A Room in My Mother's House, 2018

[Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (GF, 1977)
is an artist, researcher, exhibition curator
and film programmer who investigates
topics neglected in the history
of colonialism.]

Taking its cues from the installation Walking through the Arawak Horizon, for Wilson Harris and moving towards the making of a new feature film, the conversation between Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and Silvia Franceschini will follow various strands of the artist's research and practice across moving image, music and literature. 

             Walking through the Arawak Horizon, for Wilson Harris digs into the different types of exchanges that existed and still exist along the Maroni River, which forms the natural border between French Guiana and Suriname. This border has stood witness to many struggles, explorations and exploitations starting from the creation of the first maroon communities in the 18^th century, to the later migration of West-Indian creoles in search of gold, up until the current threat to the many native Amerindian communities that are still living up the river. These communities are suffering from water contamination by the mercury which is illegally used for gold washing, poisoning their water and food supplies and leading to soil degradation and deforestation.

             Abonnenc’s research addresses colonial and neocolonial toxicity through an auto-ethnographic account which intertwines personal and collective history and gives voice to multiple worldviews from the Caribbean and the Amazon basin. His installations and films are guided by the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, who worked throughout his poetic and philosophical career to craft a singular ecological and decolonial vision based on the confrontation of environmental issues with emancipation from the colonial fracture. According to Harris, the landscape possesses resonance and life because it is “like an open book written in an alphabet which we could each decipher […] But it takes some time to grasp what this alphabet really is.”

             This event connects to the presentation of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s Walking through the Arawak Horizon, for Wilson Harris in the exhibition Le Déracinement. On Diasporic Imagination, which is on view at Z33 House for Contemporary Art Design and Architecture in Hasselt until Sunday 16^th May 2021.

             Watch Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s film Wacapou, a Prologue or A Room in My Mother's House here. 

             The film describes the artist's search for the home once owned by his family in the small village of Wacapou, on the Maroni River. The wooden house was sold to Abonnenc’s mother in 1984 by Joseph Bernes, a former gold digger from Saint Lucia, but was never lived in by his family because of the civil war that broke out in Suriname in 1986. Abonnenc gives pictorial shape to his fragile memory of the house by combining photographs taken in the 1980s by anthropologist Michel- Baj Strobel and Abonnenc’s mother, with archival materials and his own footage of the lush rainforest that took over the guilding in recent years – and the latter’s powerful sonic environment. The artist follows the traces of the region’s Creole gold mining communities from the beginning of the 20th century to their descendants who still live there today.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Wacapou, a Prologue or A Room in My Mother's House, 2018