Entitled “I telman nwè ki i blé (So Black It Turns Blue)”, this exhibition presents a selection of Valérie John’s work dating back to the 1990s and her return to Martinique, where she set up a “workshop-work-of-art”. This choice was a commitment to pursuing her œuvre through an immersion in her milieu, one rooted in the island’s translocal memory and in a shifting gesture of identity construction.

At the Palais de Tokyo, she proposes an immersion in indigo and its metamorphoses, from the deepest blues to the brightest blacks. She draws on a palette charged with different forms of symbolism linked to water, grief, transatlantic memory, reparation and corporeal alterity. Assemblages in paper and textile, installations, clothing, objects and books unfold over the walls, spread across the floor, and hang suspended in space. This twilight journey, which echoes the island environment of Martinique, extends the research she has been pursuing since the 1980s between France and West Africa into memory and its various strata, through textile objects such as the pagne [wrapper].

Drawing on craft indigo dyeing techniques that she has learned, in particular those used in Senegal, one of the countries she calls home, Valérie John develops an art of the palimpsest that centres on the reuse of materials, writing, and the unveiling of different layers, densities and depths. Starting out from textiles, books, papers and documents that she collects and transforms, she makes a still-unfolding collective history her own, and explains that she looks to become “an anthropologist of [her] self” by “opening up to all the memories yet to be woven”.

This exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York.

It receives support from the Fonds d’aide aux échanges artistiques et culturels pour les Outre-mer (FEAC), jointly administered by the ministère de la Culture and the ministère des Outre-mer.