Parle pour toi — Projections et rencontres — Marian Goodman Gallery — Meeting — Slash Paris

Past: April 22 → July 4, 2014

Parle pour toi is a programme of videos and films curated by Marie Muracciole dedicated to the representation and circulation of speech. It gathers artists and film directors who live or work in countries marked by colonial history and various regional and international cultures.

Each of the three sections : Singulier pluriel (22-26 April) ; Reprises, montages, histoire (13- 17 May) and Transitions (27 June- 4 July) — will feature a talk with artists at the gallery. A selection of videos and films for each section will be screened during one week, everyday from 12 am to 7 pm.

Parle pour toi (Speak for yourself) means: “don’t speak for me” and alludes to the idea of standing up for an individual position. In a dialogue, that term draws the boundary — the divergence of point of view, a disagreement but also the possibility of an exchange and reciprocity. Here, this verbal image is chosen to evoke the freedom to talk, its exigencies and the strategies used to build it and make it circulate. It demonstrates the resistance of each of us against a standardization of discourses, against the ordinary and oversight of the colonial heritage, against the effects and evolutions of racism.

At a moment when the expression of democracy took an important place, even under threat, the artists define their own scale of visibility and make speech circulate against the current from a globalized and consensual culture, but also from any “identity” claims frozen in time and geopolitical space.

All the films in this programme avoid making simplified interpretations and try to incorporate doubt or humor. They participate in the construction of a shared memory, refusing uniformisation and not claiming any responsibility :

I would say that memory is, above all else, a question of responsibility with respect to a name of which one is not the author. (…) So there is no memory except in the assignation to responsibility.”

Achille Mbembe, in an interview in Esprit, 2006