Triple S — KADIST — Performance — Slash Paris

Past: Saturday, June 29, 2024

Convened by
Fatma Cheffi

Artists
Diaty Diallo and Cécile Canut

Register here

5:30-5:45pm: Performance by Fatma Cheffi
6-7pm: Conversation with Cécile Canut
7-8pm: Commented music playlist with Diaty Diallo

Triple S is a mixtape by the group 13 Block released in 2018: 11 nervous, magnetic tracks that have left their mark on the history of French trap, while imposing a unique language whose slang expressions today go beyond the borders of the country. Sweat, thirst, money; three watchwords for the quartet from Sevran who inspired Fatma Cheffi’s program at KADIST. A triple S that calls for another for me:

S for the symbol, that humiliating object that weighed down bodies and dehumanized them in colonial times.

S for the sigh of relief after escape. It’s a time for rest and reparation.

S as in the signal for subversive action.

Triple S is a program in three parts: a performance that tensions the artist’s body, a discussion to land and catch one’s breath, and finally a musical exchange to warm up before the battle. For these are particularly hostile times. “This is Paris” we are told, “not the Bamako market”. No big deal. The identity-related tensions that have become more and more apparent in recent polemics only serve to remind us of the urgency of exposing the violence inherent in learning hegemonic languages, and de-fetishizing language through the joyous and disruptive medium of rap.

Fatma Cheffi is an independent curator, artist and author based in the Paris region. She studied art history at the Sorbonne Paris IV before undertaking a master’s degree in curating and art criticism at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut. Her work takes shape in writing and unfolds through installation, performance and writing workshops. Her research and projects focus on the intersections of contemporary art and literature, linguistic politics and imaginaries in a postcolonial context, and the renewal of language in rap.

Cécile Canut is a sociolinguist and filmmaker, on secondment to the Institut Universitaire de France and a member of CERLIS. She teaches at the University of Paris in the Department of Language Sciences. Her research has focused on linguistic imaginaries in Africa, especially in Mali, and on the production of sounds, texts and images of migrations in Cape Verde, as well as on the discrimination against the Roma in Bulgaria and France. Head of Miprimo (La migration prise aux mots) at the Agence National de la Recherche, she has edited and contributed to numerous works on migration experiences in Africa and Europe, advocating for a political anthropological linguistics defending a situated approach. Her publications include Provincialiser la langue, langage et colonialisme, 2021; Langue, 2021; Mise en scène des Roms en Bulgarie, Petites manipulations médiatiques ordinaires with Stefka Stefanova and Gueorgui Jetchev, 2016. Cécile Canut has made a dozen documentary films in close collaboration with the people she meets. In Nadejda, Bulgaria, she began a collective shooting that has continued for over 15 years, which has resulted in the “Nadezhda” (Hope) series she is currently editing with S. S. Nikolova.

Diaty Diallo is an author and artist who reads, performs and sings her writings. Her first novel, Deux secondes d’air qui brûle, was published by Seuil in 2022, followed by texts for magazines and media (AOC, Dears, La Déferlante, Médiapart, Manifesto XXI…).