Minia Biabiany’s (b.1988, Guadeloupe) work investigates the perception of space, the paradigms of weaving and the concept of opacity in storytelling and language. In her practice, she deconstructs narratives related to the Caribbean’s colonial heritage in poetical mix media installations. She initiated the artistic and pedagogical collective project Semillero Caribe in 2016 and continues today with the ongoing project Doukou which explores narratives linked to the body and concepts from Caribbean authors.
Minia Biabiany, Toli Toli, 2018
HD Video colour, sound
10’
Courtesy of the artist
Toli Toli uses the spacial metaphor of an old children’s song to convey an intertwined political narrative about Guadeloupe. In the videopoem, the ‘toli toli’ – a butterfly’s chrysalid in Guadeloupean créole – points toward an inner elsewhere, toward places and distances shaped by coloniality. The moving chrysalid, the ‘toli toli’, shows an inside – a place once marked as ‘here’ by an old silence, but which now enunciates the history of the territory and denunciates strategies of assimilation. In the course of the story about a landscape where shadows possess the ‘power of naming’, two hands seem to repeatedly weave an invisible object. This visually absent figure is a bamboo weaving used in fish traps, which the artist chose as a metaphor of narration and the structure of language.
Minia Biabiany, Doubout’, 2009
Sculpture, cotton, steel stick
Courtesy of the artist
The sculpture Doubout’ uses the language of matter, the symbolic weight of cotton and cotton fields. A cotton stick marked by the accumulation of fist prints stands as an authoritarian symbol of the absence of a struggle for empowerment in contemporary Guadeloupe – which is currently a French territory – but also of the need for one. As a symbol of resistance against slavery, it rises high after being excluded from the official version of (French) history. The word ‘doubout’ means ‘standing’ in creole.
