A Gallery Visit with Nana at Transplantation
INTERVIEW Svet Chassol
PHOTOGRAPHY Micael Alves
An ongoing conversation with Nana (also known as ‘Dérive sur le Nil’) the founder and art director of Transplantation—a platform and collection dedicated to exploring and mobilizing diasporic art and experiences primarly in francophone contexts. We spoke to her about the temporary, but poignant exhibition, “École Paris-BXL."
Transplantation is a fugitive curatorial platform and art residency project that serves as a publication/dissemination body, with ongoing collection holdings that take root in diasporic objects and practices. Nana aka Dérive sur le Nil, a 22-year-old writer and art history student, is the art director behind this project--alongside the continuous involvement with friends such as the young artist Mariama Conteh, or Ryan K., Zoé C., Tanguy N., and support of many others. Dérive sur le Nil thinks of Transplantation as experimentation pictured as a puzzle driven by her meetings, likings, and need to collaborate with others.
Last September, we met her at the temporary gallery she opened in Paris for three months just after the French lockdown. It was a 2-month art residency that sought to meet the needs of practice for three art students she knows, followed by a one-month exhibition called “École Paris-BXL.” This inaugural exhibition aimed to initiate cartography of plastician research of an emerging scene between Paris and Brussels while questioning how the traditional art historical discourse of the post-war artistic scene called “ École de Paris” excluded diasporic perspectives. The location of Montparnasse where she set up this first experiment of Transplantation was a deliberate choice to celebrate the artistic diasporic heritage of this area which is hardly visible these days because the neighbourhood has been gentrified for many decades.
Although the gallery space itself was medium-sized, we could sense it had been filled with compacted energy. She walked us through the exhibited works of Aminata N'Diaye, Adam Bilardi, Azzeazy, Mariama Conteh, Cédric Kouamé, Maria André, Anthony Ngoya while we discussed how it was to open a space in the middle of a pandemic, during the largest demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement, but also transmission, diasporic practices, Beauford Delaney, and the right to opacity.
Svet: What are the origins of all this? What made you create this gallery?
Dérive: Of all this? Opening this space and all?
Svet: Yes.
Dérive: The whole lockdown and pandemic environment radicalized me, I think. I believed it was important and necessary to keep opening spaces--during the lockdown, this pandemic, being quarantined. There was a project I told you about with this art center, and it didn't happen. So I started thinking about what will happen, what I should do next... It came to fruition in this pandemic context. Everything's being cancelled; everything's uncertain. And I thought, "Ok, I've had this exhibition project for a while, and we were starting to have this idea of a collection/library,"--so I gathered everything into one single project. And then I thought "Ok so now, I have to find the space, and I will open it, in Paris, in the middle of this pandemic, in the middle of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement." You know, I was unsatisfied with the idea only to ask larger institutions to "not be neutral" and wait that those institutions agendas fit with our need to change. I don't think we need them to uplift our voices; we need them to redistribute. I didn't want to ride the BLM wave for a project; I focused on my master thesis and took part in a demonstration in Paris. And I worked on letting time pass by a bit, so it was not entirely happening simultaneously. It was bizarre. Because you know that we are all quarantined, and you don't know when it's going to end, but I still wanted to open a space where people could go and physically be.
Svet: And before that what were you doing?
Dérive: Before that, there was of course, school. But I also had done a few exhibitions with a female art collective. It was more of a pop up on the weekend: We did it in Aubervilliers once, in an abandoned hangar. I also exhibited my texts. It was called “Les Temps Sauvages” (The Savage Times). Many artists we picked ourselves, but the goal was not to have a proper curation, but more to use the space for people to express themselves. I liked that crazy energy of having multiple people from multiple backgrounds. We also did it in Brussels, with an after-party.
I guess all of that gave me the spontaneity to do this. Even though it’s a project more thought of and prepared to be on the long run, not just a weekend, it is also more mature, as I’m not 18 anymore (laughs). It’s a bit, I don’t want to say ‘for us, by us’, but we’re doing it, at least trying, and I know why we’re doing it and for WHO we’re doing it. And I’m happy when those people show up or support the project on social media. I just hope it will help show other horizons for people who look like me in this country. I mean at my scale. And I’m not talking about a more “inclusive” horizon, which still maintains at the center white, and male. I’m talking about the horizon that for instance, Suzanne Césaire and other black/diasporic radical authors and ordinary black people used to dream about: This is more about liberation than “inclusiveness”.
Svet: You’re talking about transmission here, I want to ask you. Is transmission essential?
Dérive: To be honest, when you know that you had ancestors and non-blood related forefathers and foremothers that went through the same thing you are going through right now, the same struggles, the same discussions; same exchanges as the one you and I are having right now, they probably had it already. When you know this, you feel like you are perpetrating a discontinued work that is still in progress. It gives you strong roots to be attached to.
Svet: This sounds like a shared tool amongst the diaspora(s). Or it should be.
Dérive: Do you know why the Diaspora term interested me so much? It’s more interesting for me in its symbolic dimension, not just in an ethnically essentialist definition. But also in its plastic dimension! In the Diaspora word, we feel dispersed, which means scattered. To scatter, to disseminate. There’s something more metaphoric that is more adapted to this (Transplantation Gallery).
When I say that my so-called “curatorial practice”, which is in reality just an extension of my artistic writing practice, is more focused on the fragmented, that’s exactly what I mean. All of those artists present here, I don’t need to state their actual country of “origin” in the cartel which is for the most the country of origin of their parents. What’s interesting to me is how they all share something “éclaté”(shattered).
What does this notion of diaspora say plastically? That’s what I’m wondering. And that’s why I talk about “diasporic practices”, and not just “artists from the diaspora”. It helps me put specifically their work at the forefront, instead of just their body and fixed “identity” like western neo-liberal economy like to commodify it.
Svet: What’s the picture over there?
Dérive: Ah. (laughs). So we're going back to that idea of transmission. It's a picture from 1964 of a visit to Beauford Delaney's studio. He was an African-American artist who moved here in 1951 and then died here in 1979. For this exhibition's archive dimension, I exhumed from a cultural journal called Le Musée Vivant, some ateliers visits references of artists from non-European diaspora. I discovered few artists from Africa, the Middle East; this one is from Beauford Delaney, an African-American artist. Beauford is very important and precious to me. He did portraits, abstraction; he was never in something decisive; he was always searching. Delaney was going through intersectional self-questioning as he was black and gay. He was good friend with Baldwin, and he was very fragile psychologically. Painting for him was his only way to survive. He made colorful and radiant paintings. But he was never really recognized, while still alive. Also, he did not fit in a rigid definition of what we understand as "Black Art" during the age of the black power movement. I like this notion of "Black Art" because though some tried to reduce it to "black artists representing black people", this is a lot more than a representation politic. Now, I think about it as a big space of contradictions, debates, where different futurities and aesthetics are cohabitating.
Svet: This is very interesting, this idea of "big space of ccontradictions". Sometimes I feel like Transmission can also be a prison, where some may feel like it is their responsibility to share, inform, or carry some fights that they believe are their own because of who they are. When in reality, we need to find the middle ground and not trap ourselves in order to preserve our sanity.
Dérive: I'm not sure I quite understand what you are saying. But, suppose I attempt to apply what you are trying to articulate regarding black/diasporic artists' position. In that case, it is interesting, because the 20th-century history of Black Art History, for instance, to sketch it briefly is a long debate between those who understand black art only in its relationship with a black identity cultural politic, and others who always tend to affirm an individuality artistic not related to their race. For instance, I'm thinking about the controversy between Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was saying he does not want to be a "Negro poet" but a "poet" and Langston Hughes analyzing this in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" as symptomatic of an aspiration to whiteness and bourgeois culture of the black middle class. This is an excellent example of what I was saying about "Black art" as a space of debates. I'm situated in this tension which is an aporia. I try to contextualize this aporia in my writing (fiction and criticism), research, curatorial practice, through questioning diasporic but more specifically black French art genealogies.
Dérive: There are few histories about black cultural politics: the most important is for sure Negritude but there are not any black French art movements such as the Harlem Renaissance or the British black art movement. Those artists visit studio references I curated for instance partly show this search of an individual expression of the self and its interiority before anything else. Does it mean we have to conclude that black/diasporic artists in French context are not concerned with political art? Maybe we need to also redefine what we understand as “political art”, through which norms or lenses? In a country like France where assimilation structures the understanding of recognizing the other as a French citizenship, most of the art here is political because it implicitly refuses and plays with this injunction to assimilate. This space is political, and art is essentially political. Perhaps we should stop talking about political art? For who, are we trying to explain that this or that is “political” so it should have a value? I mean those artists I’m collaborating with here are not stimuli only reacting to the exterior, they are talking from an inside, an interiority, which has the right to opacity. To refer to the "Right to Opacity" that Glissant talks about--Beauford was the personification of this right to opacity.
Svet: I firmly believe in Glissant’s right to opacity, but I also believe that now, on the contrary, some should not enjoy this right anymore. They need to be clear, they can not hide behind this right to not explain, their art or sometimes opinions. You know?
Dérive: Yes definitely, but I don’t think Glissant was addressing the right to opacity to them.
Svet: Yes, maybe.
Thank you so much Dérive sur le Nil for your time, and for sharing those thoughts, to help me and help us understand better the project of Transplantation. I sincerely can not wait for the next exhibition, or any form of project coming out of it.
Find everything about Transplantation here @TransplantationGallery and here @TransplantationLibrary
