Pélagie Gbaguidi
Dakar, Senegal
About the Artist
Pélagie Gbaguidi (from Benin born in Dakar in 1965), lives and works in Brussels. Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary "griot". A "griot" questions the individual as he or she moves through life by absorbing the words of the ancients and modeling them like a ball of fat that he places in the stomach of each passer-by with the ingredients of the day. In the practical sense, it breaks the commonplace rhythm by inserting subtle incidents integrating its part of eternity. Her work is an anthology of signs and traces on the trauma. In fact, it is one of her recurrent subjects, evidenced by the acquisition of 100 drawings of the Code Noir (1685) series at the Memorial Act in Guadeloupe. Her focus of interest is centered on the colonial and postcolonial archives and on the unmasking of the process of forgetting in history. This readjustment of the imaginary arouses in the artist the urgency to give it form, a writing of liberating images and a corpus to draw contemporary forms.
About “Somewhere In The World”
The video “Somewhere In The world” proposes a process of confronting racism and discrimination. Through masquerade and caricatures of a cultural event, the artist points out the transmission of prejudices and manipulation in the way the Other is seen. In this way, she shows how stereotypical representations participate in the elaboration of a hierarchical system in which practices of exclusion or inclusion are social and political spaces that need to be analyzed. The artist's critical viewpoint initiates a reflection on the break with the codes that produce inequalities and intends to open up a field for the encounter of possibilities.
