Listening to Revolution
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Have you ever picked up a conch shell to hear the ocean? The contemporary artist Minia Biabiany (born in Guadeloupe in 1988) explores this gesture in her video Pawòl sé Van. Displayed in the exhibition J’ai Tué le Papillon dans Mon Oreille / I Have Killed the Butterfly in My Ear (Le Magasin des Horizons, Grenoble), this piece is about being attentive to the sounds around us. For Biabiany, voices and forces have “meaning,” and she wants to “learn to hear them again.” (1)
In one of its many striking moments, Pawòl sé Van features a figure standing in profile, with a hand raised to their ear. They are holding that familiar conch shell—conical in shape, pink in color, roughly textured on the outside, and glossy on the inside. Importantly, Biabiany draws attention to this marine creature by centering it in the frame. The conch (also known as the lambi) covers the figure’s eyes. This positioning is important for the story being told: “Ne plus voir, fermer les yeux... Zié wouvè paka vwè.” Switching from French to Creole, these lines are spoken as a provocation: close your eyes...eyes that are open can’t see.
This video is an invitation to listen. Biabiany’s aesthetic choices help us reorient our attention from a visual to an auditory experience. To encourage this shift, she alternates images of the landscape with frames of absolute darkness.The conch’s horn-like shape is also relevant to this emphasis on sound. Easy to grip, it is perfect for transmitting sonic waves.
When held to the ear, you can hear the whirring winds and rolling waves. When blown into, the lambi becomes a trumpet.Touching, holding and listening to the conch creates sensation on multiple levels. It is an embodied experience.
NO FEAR NO LIMITS
Wind instruments are significant for Indigenous communities worldwide, especially those relying on marine life. The conch shell has been used to create harmonic tones and to announce sacred rites for centuries. Maroons would blow into this horned instrument to communicate with one another across vast distances. It is famously used in Nèg Mawon, a public monument to the Haitian Revolution. The conch shell, in other words, is a time-honored tool of communication that is fueled by air. Pawòl sé Van specifically describes this movement of air in the Creole language. The wind, it says, has no fear and no limits: Van paka pé / Van ka woulé. It may come in the form of a subtle breeze or a forceful hurricane. On both ends of this windy spectrum, the element of air is integral to life on land, and in water. Artists have long been inspired by the relation of marine and terrestrial worlds. We can see this trope at work in Nadia Huggins’ Transformations Series (2014-16), which explores the sea as a marker of her tropical home. Her underwater photographs are diptychs, and they position vibrant coral as an
extension of the human body. Similarly, photographer Ingrid Pollard uses marine life in the series Self Evident (1995). In Pollard’s rendition, a figure holds the shell to their ear. With eyes closed, their head leans toward the object as if it were a phone waiting to share a word. Pollard’s photograph, which is set at the beach, pictures the waves as a reminder of the conch’s sonic properties. The lambi holds the memory of water. These references to water are fitting to Pawòl sé Van given the video’s location: the French Caribbean isles of Guadeloupe.
Karukera— the indigenous Arawak name for Guadeloupe—means “island of beautiful water”. Biabiany’s video Pawòl sé Van, however, is shot primarily on land. There are no oceans or seas in sight. The camera tends to give us expansive views of Guadeloupe’s countryside, or close-ups of the earth’s floor. Whether zoomed in or out, Pawòl sé Van is an exercise in listening to big and little things. In a wide frame, for example, the song of insects and frogs drum up into a chorus. Although these creatures are invisible in the wide frame, they are perceptible by their roaring, collective sound.Their trumpeting is important to the message Biabiany wants to communicate in Pawòl sé Van. The video highlights the terrestrial life poisoned by kepone, an insecticide used in the agricultural industry. (2) Kepone runs deep into the soil in the form of a molecule called chlordecone. This molecule has hazardous effects that can last for centuries. Invisible to the naked eye, this substance also affects the sea, the rivers, and the drinking water. Biabiany’s video beckons for healing from this environmental injustice. It sounds off about chlordecone because the insecticide was exported to the French Antilles long after it was banned in metropolitan France. With the important work of journalists, scholars, activists and artists, this is now known as a silent genocide—one that poisons on purpose, and continues to threaten the right to live.
COLLECTIVE VOICE
Currently based in Guadeloupe, Biabiany delivers her urgent message in two of the local languages: French and Creole. The video’s Creole title translates to “words are wind.” It’s an invitation for us to heed the message ( pawòl) transmitted by the wind ( van). With this video, she intends to expose the harm, and make a claim for recovery. Attentive listening, as we saw earlier with the conch shell, assists with this deep work. Creole occupies the video’s soundscape in other ways, as well. Peppered throughout Pawòl sé Van are references to Mésié Kriminel, a song by the Creole musician Eugène Mona. It even closes with a written citation of his song: “Florézon an pa fasil sé mésié kriminèl la paka joué.” (3) Born in Martinique, Mona was known for his lyrical genius and for being a proponent of Creole culture. (4) Importantly, he was a master of the flute—another wind instrument. Referencing this icon of Creole music is a way for Biabiany to ground her video in Antillean modes of communication and reclamation. As our awareness of racial, eco nomic and environmental justice grows, we can better understand why artists are vocal about contamination. Lives and livelihoods are at stake. For further investigation of chlordecone’s disastrous impact, we can turn to Anaïs Verspan’s photograph Et Si l’Espace Muséal Était une Kaz I (2017). Here, individuals stand among Guadeloupe’s poisoned banana trees for their portraits. To understand the impact of waste on the environment, we can also study Kepone Experiment, a performance triptych by Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette. (5)
Similarly, in the United States, the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier famously made a case for environmental justice in the midst of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. In addition to documenting the disaster in Flint is Family (2016), she brought clean water to those impacted by contamination. Frazier’s earlier work also documented her own upbringing among industrial pollution in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Across the African diaspora, artists are pouring their energy toward change.
The flow of contamination heightens our awareness of spatial relationships that are inequitable. As with the other artists discussed here, Biabiany engages the human experience as something that is relational, and sensitive to space. By stressing sound, her video also joins a collective voice that seeks to recover from a silent genocide. It aims to demonstrate that sound can have consequence. Fermer les yeux... Zié wouvè paka vwè.
(1) Author’s correspondence with Minia Biabiany, February 5th, 2021. (2) France and the United States recognized kepone’s hazardous nature in 1972. However, until 2003 (at least), France continued to use kepone in the French Antilles, legally and illegally. (3) Spelling for the song’s title and lyrics vary across multiple sources (Misié, Mésié, Missie, Misye, etc.). (4) Eugène Mona (1943-1991) was also an actor in Euzhan Palcy’s 1983 film Sugar Cane Alley. He played the role of Douze-Orteils. (5) Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette, “Kepone. A Performance Triptych Against Soil Poisoning,” Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics, 2016. See http://www.seismopolite.com/kepone-a-performancetriptych-against-soil-poisoning.
Dr. Yasmine Espert teaches at Spelman College, University of Atlanta. Her contributions include Public Books and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. This year she is a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris.