Mémoire Matérielle

In 1932, writing in Paris at the heart of what would become the Négritude movement, Paulette Nardal argued that consciousness is not inherited passively but built — constructed through deliberate effort, developed collectively, and transmitted against the grain of erasure. Her insight was fundamentally about memory as labor: the work of preserving, reconstructing, and passing on knowledge that colonial modernity had sought to sever from its bearers. Mémoire Matérielle takes Nardal’s proposition into the field of artistic practice, gathering five artists for whom the hand — patient, repetitive, exacting — is the primary instrument of that construction.

The processes assembled here are demanding and slow: ceramic vessels built coil by coil, thread drawn through photographic surfaces, cast and strung ornament, layered pigment, reclaimed matter gathered and assembled into architecture. These are not merely aesthetic gestures. They are acts of material thinking — ways of encoding ancestral knowledge, embodied experience, and collective history into form. In each practice, memory appears not as nostalgic retrieval but as active reconstruction: something made, and made again, in the present tense.

Andile Dyalvane’s coil-built ceramics carry the imprint of amaXhosa ancestral knowledge — vessels scarified, incised, and shaped as channels of communion, in which clay itself becomes a medium of dialogue between the living and those who came before. Joana Choumali embroiders directly onto photographs, suturing image and remembrance with thread; her stitched surfaces enact a quiet, durational form of repair in which each pass of the needle is both meditation and testimony. Carla Gueye’s sculptural practice works surface and matter through accumulation and touch, insisting on the body’s presence in the made object. And Gaëlle Choisne, laureate of the 2024 Prix Marcel Duchamp, expands the conversation to the scale of installation: drawing on her Franco-Haitian inheritance, she assembles raw and reclaimed materials — bearers of Creole mythologies, oral traditions, and colonial afterlives — into environments that operate as spaces of offering and repair, moving across floor, wall, and air.

Placed in dialogue, these five practices propose that materials themselves are witnesses. Clay holds the pressure of the palm; thread records the rhythm of the wrist; salvaged matter carries the histories of its previous lives. What colonialism attempted to erase — craft traditions, embodied knowledge, cosmologies sustained in the body and the household object — persists here in material form, not as artifact but as living syntax. The exhibition moves deliberately between formal abstraction and narrative urgency, between the individual gesture and its collective resonance, trusting Nardal’s conviction that the personal, worked with sufficient care, becomes a common inheritance.

Mémoire Matérielle is, finally, an argument about time. Hand-work refuses the tempo of extraction. To build a vessel over days, to embroider a photograph stitch by stitch, to gather and bind what has been discarded, is to practice a different economy of attention — one in which making is thinking, thinking is remembering, and remembering is a form of resistance. In the hands of these artists, memory is not what remains. It is what is built.

— Azu Nwagbogu and Nkhensani Mkhari

Curators of the exhibition.