Explain me what you know, if it doesn’t bother you ?
Explain me what you know, if it doesn’t bother you?
Magalie Mobetie
VR film, installation and domino game – 2024
About the artwork
Magalie Mobetie’s work physically recreates the entrance to a garden, where visitors are invited to sit on a bench beneath a window. Using a virtual reality headset, the viewer is immersed in the garden. Through the open window, a granddaughter can be heard telling her grandmother stories about the cultivation of plants by enslaved people in the Caribbean.
The creative process
The project includes on-site research in Guadeloupe, documentary research support by Les Anneaux de la Mémoire, technical production by KHORA, development and production at the Jan van Eyck Academy through the Villa van Eyck program supported by the Institut Français NL, and is produced by MANIFEST, with participation from Armelle Denecy, Marlyse Amour, and Maëlyne Nirellep.
About the artist
November 30, 1848. Slavery in Guadeloupe has been abolished for only seven months when Louisonne, Alexandre, and their children are called before the mayor and the civil registrar of Lamentin and assigned the surname “Mobétie.” This small, administrative imprint, recovered by Magalie Mobetie three generations later, has become the filament around which her family now forges a link to its past. Through 3D installations, augmented reality and virtual reality tools, Mobetie finds ways to embody and give voice to otherwise unuttered family histories and shattered historical archives. Working from the legacy of colonialism, of peoples displaced and family lines severed or wrenched apart, she searches for new modes of cultural transmission. She uses digital tools to transform the stories inherited into legacies from the perspective of a “future ancestor.” Learn more
