Nicolas Derne’s paradoxical parades

Cliquer sur chaque image de l’article pour la voir en grand format

The Studio Lumina, a brand-new arts centre, has just opened to artists and the public, helping to remedy the undeniable lack of venues dedicated to art. Three hundred square metres with raw concrete walls, black picture rails and designer furniture. The project is coordinated and hosted by the brand-new association Zofi, named after the Creole word for the garfish. It expresses the essence of the project by using the metaphor of a shoal of fish: it is an artist’s collective, committed to sharing experiences. The artistic director is the photographer Nicolas Derné.

The Studio Lumina is much more than an exhibition space. It is an experimental space, a shared artist’s studio, including, it is true, an exhibition space, which is also open to digital art, residence workshops that will be hosting two artists this year, a shared workshop that can welcome several artists and a co-working space open to people with a range of technical skills that they can share with creative artists. A vast window at the entrance offers a wide view over the gallery even before visitors step inside the exhibition area.

The Studio Lumina is much more than an exhibition space. It is an experimental space, a shared artist’s studio, including, it is true, an exhibition space, which is also open to digital art, residence workshops that will be hosting two artists this year, a shared workshop that can welcome several artists and a co-working space open to people with a range of technical skills that they can share with creative artists. A vast window at the entrance offers a wide view over the gallery even before visitors step inside the exhibition area.

The Studio Lumina was launched as part of a public / private partnership. For the private sector, the company providing the space also supports the association’s activities. For the public sector, the Martinique Cultural Affairs Department (DAC) is funding investment in the lighting equipment, picture rails and other elements. The association would like to take private partnerships further. Partnerships would not be limited to financial support but could also take the form of pooling skills. Creating a bridge between the world of art and the world of business is one of the main aims.

The programme for the coming year is currently being developed. The artists in residence for this first session are Georges Emmanuel Arnaud and Ibiyanε.   Tania Doumbe Fines and Elodie Dérond founded the design studio Ibiyanε in 2020. In the Batanga language in southern Cameroon Ibiyanε means « to know each other ». Arising from modern visions of Caribbean and sub-Saharan practices in ergonomics and comfort, their creations are designed and made by hand.  The option was taken for a non-limited residence in terms of time and results, all through the year, to foster interactive practices, deeper research and, concerning Ibiyanε, to produce their first collection, since until now the interdisciplinary duo have mainly worked on commissions.

The photo exhibition Parades by Nicolas Derné will be inaugurating the first season at the Studio Lumina. Nicolas Derné explains the reasons for his choice, even though Parades was already exhibited at the Tropiques Atrium in 2019.  It’s a pity that plays are only performed once in Martinique.   In the same way, only seeing an exhibition once is finally not enough. What’s more, the staging has been renewed here. And most of all, the exhibition of photos of the Caribbean Carnival aimed to give our project a fully Caribbean dimension directly. I saw that we knew very little about artists from the Caribbean. In this venue dedicated to the Caribbean area, Parades shows the Caribbean carnival with pictures of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Trinidad. But there are no exhibit labels deliberately, since the idea is to show the Caribbean area and its interconnected reality, not several different carnivals. To show the region we live in and ask ourselves what we know about it.

Cliquer sur chaque image de l’article pour la voir en grand format

Dramatisation and ambiguity are features of this black-and-white series on the carnival, far removed from traditional, exotic and festive clichés. Through the carnival, as in the follow-up series, Archipelago, a world opened up to me, enabling me to talk about much more than the festive carnival. We could be seeing a rebellion. It is a dreamlike world, a moment in history, symbols we can recognise sometimes. I like thought-provoking scenes, which raise questions… where viewers lose their bearings and ask what is really happening before their eyes.

Seeing Hitler surrounded by an army of devils in a carnival parade in the Dominican Republic, which suffered under a ferocious dictatorship involving the merciless persecution of Haitians, shows us something other than a simple carnival parade.

Behind the festivities, there is mysticism, energy, the relationship with religion, with the cross, with horns, with the whip and the history of colonisation. This is what Aimé Césaire explained when he saw the mask of the red devil on Mardi Gras in Casamance, Senegal. In Senegal, it is the mask of the initiated. The buffalo’s horns are a bit like the horns of plenty, a symbol of spiritual riches.  And this is why the story is dramatic: in the Caribbean, the mask became the devil. It is as if the god of the defeated had become the devil of the victor. Aimé Césaire adds, that it seems as if this story sums up the history of the West Indies. And this devil is a part of all Caribbean carnivals, the « diabolo cojuelo » in the Dominican Republic and our own Papa Djab

We can also see the devil in this strangely fascinating photo, where we do not really know which characters are painted and which ones are real

This ambiguity is what gives such force to Nicolas Derné’s photographs and leads viewers to new ways of thinking. What does it show us really? A Bradjack car? A tank? Where are we? In Fort-de-France? In Tiananmen? Our visual culture also plays a part in our way of seeing.

As in Umberto Eco’s concept of the Open Work, Nicolas Derné’s photos are fundamentally ambiguous messages with several different meanings coexisting beneath a single signifier. Ambiguity is not just a chance element and can become an explicit aim of the work, an asset. Viewers can play an active role in the work, their partnership is required by the work. Their personal sensibility, culture, tastes, prejudices influence their readings. Each person has to delve into the layers of the image. The image speaks of the joys of the Cuban carnival, but also globalisation, which has made a trompeta china (made in China), the iconic instrument of Caribbean carnivals.

Parades takes his career in a slightly new direction. As part of the 20th anniversary of « Regards sur Cours », the Institut Français in Dakar, Senegal is organising a collective exhibition from 29 April to 28 May 2023 in partnership with La Station Culturelle (Martinique). The exhibition compares and shifts our view of parades, whether they are carnivals in the Caribbean or the creation (and display) of contemporary mutant masks in the Kédougou region. Fire, transfiguration, trance, catharsis, living cultural heritage, spiritual links and wandering. Anaïs C. (Guadeloupe), Culture Ailleurs (France), Nicolas Derné (Martinique), Gorgorlou (Senegal) prepared the collective exhibition together as part of a multidisciplinary residence.

Dominique Brebion