Join us for a free storytelling workshop with Brussels-based Beninese artist Pélagie Gbaguidi on the occasion of our current exhibition De-Fossilization of the Look. Gbaguidi’s painting and drawings ponder on the depiction of sacralised motherhood and woman’s place and agency in the patriarchal society and reflect on the invisibility of elderly women in society, their untold stories and unacknowledged wisdom.
By observing the historical image, La Madonna Del Parto (after 1457) by Piero de la Francesca, we will reflect on representations and explore how an archival document can unfold into a political and social narrative, and become the framework for a personal story, leading to a space for discussion and collective production. Gbaguidi would like to invite you to ‘the healing room’ in the exhibition, where we will be able to accompany these exchanges with sewing, drawing and writing. This collective creative experience will highlight how archives can still affect the present and our lives, both personally and collectively.
This collection of stories will activate our awareness of the notion of an archipelagic world (Édouard Glissant's term). We are a plurality of links and lives.
The workshop is free and open to the public, welcoming people from different backgrounds.
Limited capacity to 10 people. Book your free ticket in advance here.
About Pélagie Gbaguidi
Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary ‘griot’, which she defines as someone who functions as an intermediary between individual and collective memory and ancestral past. Her work is an anthology of the signs and traces of trauma and is centred on colonial and postcolonial history. She draws attention to the ways in which legacies of oppression are circumvented – and thus preserved – in official histories. She aims to reveal the process of forgetting by recontextualizing archives and histories. Her works are not direct representations of a traumatic past but rather transmit embodied knowledge. Her paintings and drawings have a performative character: she often uses parts of her body to apply paint or pigment to the canvas. The images created by Gbaguidi through painting, drawing, performance and installation seek to break out of binary thinking, archetypes and simplifications.
In 2017 she participated in documenta 14 in Kassel with 'The Missing Link Dicolonisation Education by Mrs. Smiling Stone'. This installation consisted of school desks, photographs and drawings on long scrolls hanging from the ceiling. The notebooks on the desks were the result of a workshop that Gbaguidi held over the course of documenta 14 with pupils from a local school. The installation puts forward education and knowledge transmission as the antidote to collective amnesia.
For her important series 'Naked Writings' she investigated the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. The title 'Naked Writings' refers to the importance of un-learning, of shedding prior beliefs and consequently decolonizing the mind.
Pélagie Gbaguidi has participated in the Berlin Biennale (2020), documenta 14 (2017), the Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and the Dakar Biennale (2004, 2006, 2008, 2014 and 2018). Her work has featured in group shows at Centre Pompidou-Metz, WIELS (Brussels), Musée Rochechouart, Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp), Stadtmuseum (Munich), MMK (Frankfurt), National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.).
