En eaux troubles
Text
How to continue producing, as an artist who belongs to a social group perceived as a minority? Behind the current openness of art institutions to so-called minorities, there are a number of difficulties for the artists involved, including Neige Sanchez, the author of this thesis. Sanchez, for instance, attests to the duty to represent a community, the feeling of being an alibi, the obligation to explain their reference codes. Their research considers a series of strategies that attempts to answer this initial question. The work of theorist Tina Campt on the politics of the gaze through black gaze and the development of a multisensory approach, of José Esteban Munõz on the processes of disidentification and fragmentation, and of painter Toyin Ojih Odutola on the re-creation of a mythified history through fictional and radical spatio-temporal displacement, all inspired Sanchez to propose a working methodology in which abstraction, opacity, diversion and multidimensionality impose themselves as modes of resistance and sustainability for the artist, in the face of market and institutional forces of recuperation, simplification and control.
