31 PROJECT, gallery dedicated to the promotion of African contemporary art scenes is presenting in collaboration with the curator Eva Barois De Caevel, the collective exhibition On fait des dessins dans la terre.

With works by Naomi Lulendo, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Georgina Maxim and Charlotte Yonga

Curator statement – Extract

This is not an exhibition submitted to a theme in charge of bringing together more or less artificially these artists but to give all its measure to a meeting by affinity and emotional. It is also to bring together a generation of artists whose work I have been observing with attention since several years and with which I have for the most partworked several times. Define what makes one feels affinities between works and artists is not always easy to theorize, or to poeticize. The affinities here are both thematic and formal. They also exist at the level of these artists, their personal narratives, their communities.
The title of the exhibition is a loan from « L’Opoponax » by Monique Wittig. It is a reading that was recommended to me by female students in School of Fine Arts where I have the chance to teach. This Opoponax is what allows me to to suggest both these affinities between women (these student artists, the artists I’m talking about in my classes, the worker that I am) and the formal and thematic affinities contained in the pieces: sober, modest gestures, techniques simple, the search for and enhancement of pleasure to isolate these simple gestures, to look for themselves, to find oneself there and to get lost in it, but also to consider the shapes they produce with delight. It is also about, still at the level of these echoes of continuity between objects produced, of a continuity between objects produced and their birth or their becoming, sometimes, in the performance, of narrations that weave themselves around organic, from childhood (and even from the very young), to the childhood), maternity, matriculation and childhood), maternity, matrescence and maternal and infantile bodies, and which are deployed in the the multiplicity of mediums.

« On fait des dessins dans la terre » pays attention and makes one want to pay attention, I hopefully, to links between women.

Eva Barois De Caevel – Paris, 2020

31project.com/onfaitdesdessinsdanslaterre