Marlon Riggs, Howardena Pindell, Wapinduzi Productions
Friday February 8, 2008 – 20:30
Maison Populaire, Montreuil
FREE ENTRY
“Racism, like the sexism, is a pathology before very visual: it agrees on the differences which one perceives of appearances and not on the differences in genetic ascent. Art is before a whole visual medium. Thus political art should seem to have the potential to provide a powerful antidote to racism…” Adrian Pipper, 1998 (quoted by Elvan Zabunyan in Black has color). The artists African-American who are registered, in the United States, since the Sixties, within feminist art and since the Nineties, within an art queer, clashed with the oppressions registered until in their bodies and their skins. Visual arts were made the privileged place of such a critical work. By the poetic and political development of a plastic culture returning account of the black experiment and that of abjectés sexual subjects, vidéos activists and vidéos artists raised the challenge of the invention of Ut
opias and identity autonomies.
Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs (55’, 1990)
“Of the black men liking of the black men is the revolutionary act”, is it says in “Tongues untied” (untied Languages), realized in 1990 by the scenario writer, teacher, activist, and essay writer Afro-American Marlon Riggs dead of the AIDS in 1994, in this film of artist where it is question of the membership of the black identity and the merry identity and of the difficulty of representing itself in an experiment which is thought like contradictory. Being made to the echo room of singular accounts black men ridges some with the contempt homophobe black community and with the refusal of any recognition of the blacks in the Californian merry community, the characters of Tongues Untied are all exiled of themselves. It is still question, in this film with the beauty spell-binding, with silence, arms mortifère, of not expressed anger, this humanity whose insult seeks to déchoir, and of the social death which the racism and the homophobie of the american company generate. One of the voices of film, known as as follows: “I was an invisible man, I had neither shade, neither substance, neither place, neither history, nor reflection”. The accounts which intersect, intermingled with poems with Essex Hemphill, Steve Langley, Alan Miller, songs of Nina Simone or Roberta Flack, performances rap resulting from subcultures of the ballrooms and voguing, are freed from dumbness, weaving a community of experiment and a community of action.
Free, White and 21 by Howardena Pindell (1980, 12’)
Via New Work by Kagendo Murungi (Wapinduzi Productions) (1995, 10’)
Via NewYork explores the politization of the African students in New York and the participation of the lesbians and South-African gays in the fights against apartheid, and thus constitutes instantaneous lives lesbians and merry African through the angle of the migration and the university life, experiments which catalyse both transformation of oneself and social change.
Wapinduzi Productions is a multi-media African base, translocale and native for creation independent and the feminist distribution of vidéos and LGBTST “of colors” around the world.
