Exhibition: Monika Emmanuelle Kazi at the Swiss Cultural Center
When: 19.09.2026 00:00
Where: 48.858271, 2.359699
Organizer: Admin
SAM 19.09 : Opening Reception
Radio Nova invites the public to continue the evening on the CCS stage with two concerts. Free entry from 20:00 +
With soft ground, the artist transforms the CCS into an architecture crossed by memories. A structure of mobile picture rails occupies the space. The walls become projection surfaces where family narratives, childhood traces and
broader stories linked to colonial legacies, economic exchanges and flows of raw materials and resources emerge.
At the heart of the project is a particular attention to building materials and what they tell. Cement, introduced on the African continent during the colonial period to build “in stone,” gradually replaced vernacular materials better suited to local climates. By hindering the natural circulation of air and humidity, it leaves condensations and halos on the walls that Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reinterprets as drawings or crystallizations of memory. Conversely, tropical woods exported to Europe reappear in her works as marquetry, revealing other circulations of materials, values and histories.
The title soft ground evokes both mobility, instability and the humidity of a constantly transforming soil, inscribing her mobile-furniture installation in this same ecosystem. Made of mobile wooden panels, it is traversed by details, traces and layers of memory. By opening the picture rails, the artist reveals its framework and lets sand flow through the gaps. Pyrography, sapele (Congo mahogany) marquetry and fragments of wallpaper come to inscribe intimate and transcontinental narratives in this moving architecture.
Tags: installation, exhibition, concert
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/exposition-monika-emmanuelle-kazi-au-centre-culturel-suisse-116278
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