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34
Les Prairies's artists
MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC
Movie poster for Africa Addio.
Directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1966. D.R.
Co-production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Frac Bretagne,
Pavilion, Leeds,
Ecole des Beaux-Arts de
Nantes Métropole.
Mathieu Abonnenc explores the
colonial past. He works on figures
and events that official history has
suppressed. In Des corps entassés
('piled bodies'), the first part of a longterm
project, his ongoing research,
always underpinned by in-depth
study of precise situations, focuses
on copper (malachite), a material that
was one of the causes of the Katanga
War of Secession and, before that,
of the West's interest in the territory.
Abonnenc's film shows a dozen
Katanga crosses being melted down
in an English foundry and then cast
into a bar whose length corresponds
to that of an average human being.
For centuries (from the 10th century
up to Belgian colonisation in the 19th
century) these crosses were used as
currency in Central Africa. The brutal
act of appropriation represented in
the film is intended as an echo of
Belgian appropriation of the entire
reserves of Katanga crosses. The film
is accompanied by commentaries
relating several stories. Some of
the stories deal with phenomena of
cultural appropriation and the ensuing
violence; others are a narration of
aesthetic facts that bring out the
connotations of choice of material or
of production styles, in other words
their political and ethical significance.
No material is neutral. It implicates
and recounts human lives. Through
the story of a mineral, Abonnenc
reconstitutes an episode in the history
of capitalism and its mechanisms,
showing the effects of industrialisation
by European nations on colonised
nations and populations. The film is
presented along with several copper
bars in a scenography whose spatial
constraints denote authority.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1977 in Guyana (France),
lives and works in Paris (France).