The Words of Negroes
The Words of Negroes
Sylvaine Dampierre
Audiovisual Installation – Photographic sound maze, Video triptych, Drawings – 2024
About the artwork
The installation combines video, photography (portraits by Bernard Gomez), sound, text, and drawings to set an immersive experience of reconnection with memory. It paints a three-dimensional portrait of Guadeloupean workers, perpetuating immemorial gestures in their cane fields and their ancient sugar factory. I bring them an archive : the trial report of a slave owner of Marie Galante, judged for the murder of one of his slaves. This text contains a treasure : the transcript of the words pronounced by the slaves who came to testify in their master’s trial. The men seize and embody them, and thus give back to life a forgotten memory. The Words of Negroes proposes a journey: from the exploration of the trace to the image of the timelessness of human labor. It leads from the present to the past, to express the links between them, to feel them. The installation invites the spectator to experience the inscription of a fragile memory, against erasure and oblivion.
The creative process
I gathered the material for this installation during the shooting of my latest film. It unfolds the experience of the film in time and space. It traces a path from impression and sensation to the appropriation of knowledge, and proposes a physical displacement through three steps, three successive spaces. I call the first “the labyrinth of words”, where visitors trace their own path through the embodiment of the archive, the second plunges them into “the scene of labor”, and the third, virtual, is a space of documentation and appropriation of memory.
About the artist
Sylvaine Dampierre is a Guadeloupean filmmaker. Her first feature film “Le Pays à l’envers” (2005) is dedicated to Guadeloupe and her family history. She goes back to the days of slavery to find traces of her family and the name that was given to her descendants when the island was abolished in 1848. In 2006, she co-founded the Varan Caraïbe association for the promotion of Caribbean cinema in Guadeloupe, which offers training in documentary filmmaking and promotes Caribbean cinema. In 2019, she is collaborating with Bernard Gomez on a book of photographs and joint exhibitions (IN SITU, Galerie M Paris, February 2023). Her latest feature-length documentary “Paroles de Nègres” (2021) won the International Critics’ Prize at DokLeipzig and the Best Feature Film Award at TTFF (Trinidad). Learn more
