Inputs and Talk with Q&A
Following the sonic and artistic iterations, this roundtable iteration comprises artistic, curatorial, poetic, acoustic, activist, and scholarly propositions unfolding around key concepts in the discussion of restitution, including ‘repair’, ‘the body’, ‘objects’, ‘museums’, ‘relations’, ‘rehabilitation’ and highlights the tensions, frictions, ruptures, and possibilities of grappling with fractured histories, object agency, and reparation.
With a proposition by Assia Zouane and Estelle N’Tsendé (Les Lunettes décoloniales), followed by a discussion between the directeur of the Marseille museums Xavier Ray & philosopher Barbara Cassin, and a roundtable including choreographer and artist Dorothée Munyaneza, moderated by anthropologist Jonas Tinius.
Assia Zouane and Estelle T’Sendé are part of the Marseille collective Les Lunette Décoloniales.
‘The collective Les Lunette Décoloniales is a working group born from the encounters of committed women – artist, social worker, activist, popular education trainer, psychologist, feminists – anxious to question our society. Our cultural mix and our multiple affiliations are at the heart of our reflections and our actions. Aware of the importance of remembering in the here and now, we want, through our unique lives, our legacies and our stories, share our vision in deconstruction on issues of gender, race and class. It is through the prism of art, as a means of expression, that we forge links, by carrying out testimonies, meetings, workshops, performances and readings open to all in order to make the various missing voices heard, including ours.’
Xavier Rey is the appointed director of the Museums of the City of Marseille. After various engagements at the Center Pompidou, the Louvre, the Musée des Confluences in Lyon and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but also in an investment bank, Xavier Rey was curator and then director of collections at the Musée d’Orsay after obtaining his diploma as curator at the National Heritage Institute. Since 2017, he has been director of the Museums of Marseille, which brings together ten museums and thirteen heritage institutions in the city preserving a universal heritage of human creation ranging from Egyptian Antiquity to contemporary art through fashion, around the central flagship of the Centre de la Vieille Charité.
Barbara Cassin, member of the French Academy and CNRS gold medalist, is a philologist and philosopher, specializing in ancient Greece. She curated the exhibition Après Babel, translate(Mucem, 2016-2017), and is working with Muriel Garsson (MAM) for an exhibition on ‘Migratory objects’ at the Vieille Charité. Together with Danièle Wozny she created the association “House of wisdom-translate”, which works in particular with African “cultural banks”.
Dorothée Munyaneza was born in Rwanda and lives now in Marseille. She is a singer, writer and choreographer that has developed a highly impassioned body of work that takes reality as its starting point and captures aspects of memory and the body, both from an individual and collective standpoint. She gives a voice to those who are silenced; by making their silence heard, she lays bare the scars of History.
Munyaneza worked on the soundtrack for the movie Hotel Rwanda (2004). As a singer, she released her first solo album in 2010, which was produced by Martin Russell. In 2012, she collaborated with British composer James Seymour Brett to produce the album Earth Songs. She has worked on the international dance scene with Nan Goldin, Mark Tompkins, Robyn Orlin, Rachid Ouramdane, Maud Le Pladec and Alain Buffard. In 2013 Munyaneza founded her own company, Kadidi, and produced the work Samedi Détente (Saturday relaxation) which debuted in November 2014 at the Théâtre de Nîmes. The show toured extensively, with some 100 performances in France and abroad. Unwanted, her second show, has been performed for the first time in the summer of 2017 at the 2017 Festival d’Avignon and also at the Festival d’automne à Paris.
