On 4 May 2023 at 9 p.m., for the last event of Diversions – Moving Image Showcase Vol. II, Parsec presents Mawena Yehouessi’s Sol in the Dark (2022) curated by Atlantico Festival at Circolo Dev.
Chimeras, flesh, noises and pixels — Sol in the Dark is a dense, multi-layered, collective collage film that recalls in several chapters the figure of Lascar. Not just only a villain or a thug, Lascar is a body, fetish and avatar: a character at once imaginary and deeply rooted in reality. It is a promiscuous figure, referring as much to the young BIPOC of the French suburbs of the 1990s as to the Southeast Asian sailors and soldiers enlisted by European colonial powers between the 16th and 20th centuries, or, again, to the visions present in Sun Ra and John Coney’s Space is the Place (1974): “Lascar” stands as a symbol and ghost of collective identities and fleeing genealogies. At the same time, it is an homage to the imaginaries of Rap, Afrofuturism, post-colonial studies and post-internet aesthetics.
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Born in 1990 in Cotonou (Benin), Mawena Yehouessi is a collisionist: art curator, researcher and artist. Founder of the Black(s) to the Future collective and currently engaged in a PhD at Villa Arson / Université Côte d’Azur, she lives and works between Paris and Nice (France).
Through alter-futurisms and poïetic realities, she develops an implorative (rather than exploratory), collaborative and perspectival practice of collage. Her (Mawena) and their (M.Y, her avatar) media oscillate: from visual/digital syncretism and film to poetry, translation, pedagogy, and the creation of collective events and parties she calls performances. Trained in literature, philosophy, cultural project management and contemporary dance, she is part of those phantom generations of unclassifiable beings whose works, imaginaries, activities and employments are an aggregation of cuts, anomalies, subterranean commonalities and dislocations.
Atlantico Festival is a multidisciplinary project that explores the cultural universes of the African continent and its diasporas. Started as a music and film festival in 2018, over the years Atlantico has organized music events, book presentations and the #Atlanticowaves review (2019) among photographic installations, art documentaries and reading groups.
Admission up to you with AICS membership card.
For more info write to parsec.bo@gmail.com