Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (b.1977, GF) is an artist, researcher, exhibition curator and film programmer who investigates topics neglected in the history of colonialism. His work addresses themes of absence, haunting and the representation of violence through processes of extraction and excavation. Abonnenc aims to reintroduce overlooked individuals and cultural materials to our collective history. His practice often involves collaboration between actors from various disciplinary fields and incorporates the production of drawings, films, slideshows and discursive devices. Nonetheless, it always reflects on the role of images in identity formation and weaves new associations between them.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Secteur IX B, 2015
HD video, colour, sound
41’58”
Courtesy of the artist

The starting point of the film Sector IX B was the discovery of an old family photo album containing a series of pictures of objects as well as a series of pictures of individuals, families, officers and landscapes. All these photographs were shot in Gabon by the artist’s grandfather over a period of three years, from 1931 to 1934. Secteur IX B is a fiction, almost science-fiction, film, which weaves political issues together with scientific and artistic narratives which still inform national and international relations in the former colonial empire today. The project re-reads a personal desire to collect and classify objects in light of a collective history. Among all the collecting campaigns, the Dakar-Djibouti mission and its role in the creation of the Musée de l’Homme is the most significant example available, especially thanks to Michel Leiris’ diary.

Sector IX B deals with the policies of cultural appropriation – of places and modes of knowledge production – as well as how we can question this scientific legacy now. On the one hand, the film aims to subvert the homogeneity of scientific adventure narratives in a colonial context; on the other hand, it questions the place each individual occupied – in this specific case the artist’s grandfather – in the processes of cultural appropriation and the accumulation of symbolic and economic wealth. The main character is a young anthropologist trying to redefine the boundaries of her discipline. In order to do this, she redesigns the pharmaceutical prescriptions given to the members of the famous Dakar-Djibouti Mission, then tests the effects of the drugs on herself. She falls slowly in a fantastical world, sinking into a hallucination entirely produced by the synthetic substances.