Laura Henno, Archipelago Images

Since 2013, the artist Laura Henno has been documenting the archipelagos of Comoros and Mayotte in her own way, by

means of films and photographs. She is now closing this chapter with the video triptych Ge Ouryao! Pourquoi t’as

peur!, produced by the SAM Prize and exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo alongside previous projects (April 14th—September

4th, 2022, curator: Adélaïde Blanc). Stripped of staging and fiction, this piece also marks a development: her practice

has become a matter of atmosphere.

La Meute, Mayotte. Série series Djo.

2018. C-Print. 120 x 150 cm

Three screens, over 10 foot wide, arranged in a semi-circle, occupy the corner of a room in the Palais deTokyo.They display a triptych of Laura Henno’s latest film, the culmination of almost 10 years of images from Mayotte, France, and Comoros. This film, Ge Ouryao! Pourquoi t’as peur!, produced by the SAM Prize, which Henno won in 2019, is longer than the previous ones (30 minutes versus 10-20), and the first of hers to be so complex. Condensing hours of rushes shot over a 5year period, inhabited by all these characters with whom she rubbed shoulders, loaded with different territories and stories, it is also the first to be carried by a real sound editing, beyond direct sound recordings. And yet it is also the first to be devoid of dialogue, except for some words which appear to be in Shimaore, but which are not subtitled. As the sign of an evolution, the three screens also echo three projects, all three exhibited, which the artist conducted in these two archipelagos in the Indian Ocean, marked by the migrations between the islands. In 2016, in her film Koropa, we discovered Ben and Patron in a motorboat in Comoros: Ben the smuggler, and surrogate father, training Patron, the pilot-child, a minor who did not risk prison, in the middle of the night—a double passage, of smuggling and transmission. In 2015, when Patron decided to go clandestinely to Mayotte, Henno followed him and met the gangs of young people, mostly undocumented, who lived on the margins with their pack of dogs.This was the beginning of two series of films and photographs: Djo, focusing on the story of Smogi in the heights of Mayotte, as close to the forest and its spirits as to his dogs; and Ge Ouryao!, about the Boucheman, a community of teenagers on a beach, trapped between the shore and the city that rejects them. Images extracted from the rushes filmed amongst the latter group were published as a book in 2019.That was some kind of pact: access to their daily life in exchange for a book. Fragments of it now appear in a film.

WHY ARE YOU AFRAID

Ge Ouryao! opens with seas of sky cut across by branches. Already present in the film Djo (2018), they appear this time as if drifting, filmed at night, milky or clear depending on the moon and clouds. The stage is set and

peopled by these nocturnal existences on the margins, without electricity: Smogi, the Boucheman and their dogs on the coast, as well as Patron in the middle of the mangroves on his (own) boat. His face and surroundings gradually appear in shot/counter shot on the three screens. He is now 21 years old but still has the same big, watchful eyes, full of worry: a longstanding fear that imbues all of Henno’s work. “Ge Ouryao!” also means “Why are you afraid!”, a code between the artist and the Boucheman, synonymous with the fear they inspire or their own anxieties. These anxieties, ever-present despite the harshness of the context, do not preclude the luminous softness, the blurred pastel of swimming filmed under water, an amniotic fluid merging the ocean, the Boucheman and their dogs.

Yet a world surrounds these characters. It is mysterious when Smogi whistles and howls like a wolf in the night to call his dogs, of whom we see only the eyes, small luminous circles in the dark. It is mysterious and connected when Patron’s phone rings, also at night, lighting up the mangroves that evoke spirits, the flight of slaves, and trafficking. It gets tense when Patron approaches the city with passengers. It is even more tense in the intermediate areas where the Boucheman live: the shore as the only area of circulation; the wall of the town hall and its large gates, a high point overlooking the main road of Mayotte where they squat in the evening.

Whilst the tension between this community and the rest of society is sketched out on these “borders,” it is exemplified in a scene shot at ground level, encircled by the ochrerose light of the powdery sand, the lighthouses and the torches: the viewpoints waltz across the three screens as Dakar, the chief of the Boucheman, “dances” with the pack, part dog training, part ritual, part fight to prove his strength and courage.

FIREFLIES

Thus, Henno shows without showing: she conjures up. Without dialogue or narrative, the film Ge Ouryao!, a documentary in its own way, is all about the atmosphere. Time dilates. The three screens reject any single authoritarian point of view. Fragmentary information, neither too much nor too little, flutters from sequence to sequence, distilling a universe with the sound of the engine, waves, and whistles for reference, and, as a guide, the tempo of the screens and a luminous punctuation: the moon in the distance, the lights and torches, dog’s eyes, cigarette embers. Fireflies. The development might seem surprising if we think back to the artist’s first photographs, staged and scripted, made with a photographic chamber. Yet Henno’s work follows a common thread.The

Summer Crossing series (2001-2011) featured teenagers posing in nature, especially near the water, in Finland, in Dunkerque (young people hospitalised for anorexia or obesity) or in Rome.There was no indication of their history.

The impression emanating from the series played with the dawn and the foggy landscapes: an aesthetics of uncertainty, where nothing was imposed, nor enclosed. The same striking expressions, both terrified and resilient, were already present. Then, from 2009, Henno became interested in clandestine migration. On Reunion Island, she photographed young people from Comoros in La Cinquième Île (2009-2012), a series in which they played their own roles, in a meticulous staging that was partly blurred by smoke. Similarly, for the prints of Missing Stories (photographs, 2012) in Lille, she worked with underaged foreigners in foster care who, like the Boucheman, were trapped between the shore and the city. Although the scenarios contained in her images always tended towards the cinematographic, it was in 2014, with this series, that she came to film: speech, silences and the unspoken had been missing. Made with a film crew in Calais, Missing Stories (film, 2014) was co-written based on the stories which these young people told to the authorities to avoid being sent home (since they were minors and without family). Although the film was a documentary, it was the fiction that provided information.

Having gone to search behind the lookingglass in Comoros—following the migrants, the smugglers—Henno’s meeting with Ben and Patron proved decisive. Hurriedly, in order not to miss anything, she improvised a film on their boat with her digital camera: a liberating starkness of means. With Koropa, she moved from the script to spontaneous storytelling against a backdrop of engines and darkness. The minimalist atmosphere began to speak. Becoming more flexible, her series began to breathe intuitively along with her subjects. Thus, in Slab City, a sea of sand in the United States, she returned to the photographic chamber in contact with a community which had established its own rules far from the city. The conditions were different, she had time to photograph them and their caravans ( Outremonde series, since 2017): the same ochrerose light, the same poetry and harshness, the same expressions, neither reassured nor resigned. A feature film will follow Haven (2018-2020). For Henno, the visual content of a project evolves over the course of years and exhibitions.

Although Henno may find her source in the margins, it is not so much for the margins themselves as to document the resolutely different spaces of freedom which are invented there in the face of adversity. In the image, these spaces are contained within the eyes or bright spots. With Ge Ouryao!, the entire film becomes the pupils of archipelagos in which to dive.

Translation: Juliet Powys

Annie Reading the Bible, Slab City (USA). Série series Outremonde. 2018. C-Print. 74 x 94 cm