PARIS
JUNE 1 - JULY 20,2024
SEPTEMBRE 3 - SEPTEMBRE 21, 2024
Magalie Grondin has been invited by Fondation H for a research and production residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, to be followed by an exhibition from June 1stto July 20th, 2024 at Parisian space of Fondation H as part of the foundation’s Mizaha Paris program.
Magalie Grondin was born in 1972 in La Réunion. She grew up in metropolitan France, where her family went to exile in 1975 following France’s policy of denaturalization of Reunion Island between the 1960s and 1980s. After graduating from high school, she returned to her native island to settle down and study ceramics, then object design. The artist subsequently resumed her studies at the École supérieure des arts of La Réunion in 2020 and obtained her Master’s degree in 2021.
Magalie Grondin sees herself as a matter artist. She works with clay and recycled materials such a sinner tubes, as well as natural materials such as water, wood and shells. Magalie Grondin draws her inspiration from her family history, marked by uprooting and the difficulty of adapting to life in metropolitan France after leaving La Réunion. Guided by her multicultural history and the need to reconnect with her origins, she embarks on a journey of initiation to the Indian Ocean in 2023, exploring the traces of the region’s women and drawing inspiration from her own past and the stories of her female ancestors. Her aim is to reconnect with the “sister-women” of the Indian Ocean islands by looking at their daily lives, their relationship to love and the body, while probing the challenges they face in patriarchal societies.
In her project Fonnkèr La Line [Moon Talk], presented at Fondation H, Magalie Grondin explores the charcoal technique by producing large-format drawings evoking figures of mermaids and women impregnated by the moon and mangroves, as references to evocations of the female body in La Réunion and Mayotte. The artist also presents two installations. The first, “Déterrer les sorcières” [Unearthing the Witches], refers to the historical persecution of women deemed too fringe, through a set of wooden poles set against a wall, adorned with black hair reminiscent of witches’ hair. The second installation is a tribute to the female ancestors of the Indian Ocean: it features a set of “salouva” — a traditional Mayotte fabric —, suspended in the space like a labyrinth of curtains, and gourds filled with water and rice as offerings on an altar formed by ceramic breasts laid on the floor. Audio recordings of women sharing their daily experiences are added to enrich the installation.
The Fonnkèr [deep down in the heart] is a poetic oral expression in Creole, conveying feelings about colonial assimilation and denouncing the slavery period. The Fonnkèr reflects a deep-seated feeling specific to the history of La Réunion —Magalie Grondin’s home territory —, which she sees as an island of “uprooted people”. As to challenge the impossibility of a collective original narrative, the exhibition takes as its setting the legendary continent of Lemuria, initially the product of geological and naturalistic speculation on the prehistoric origin of the Lemurian species. In Jules Hermann (1845-1924)’s book, the hypothesis of this forgotten world becomes a true founding myth whose geography, language and poetics reposition representations of the origins of humanity towards the Indian Ocean. Traces of this dream like past can be found in the shape of the mountains of India, Madagascar and La Reunion, whose remarkable contours are said to have been shaped by quasi-human beings in titanic works of art. In her exhibition, the artist uses this narrative to rewrite the dramaturgy of her ancestry, in which the images of mermaids and witches embody a feminist resistance to the mechanisms of patriarchal and neo-colonial control.
Magalie Grondin first imagines these legendary ancestors in the familiar form of mermaids as in the diptych “women-with-gills” or zazavavindrano. In Malagasy oral tradition, these mermaids are called women with “gills”, which are vital and vulnerable parts of their bodies, whose shape sexualizes them. These tales depict them as beings that are both revered and demonized, reigning over the seasand terrestrial waters, alternately tidal waves and sailing guides. In many tales, they become the wives of sailors and fishermen, who covet and fear them at the same time. During her terrestrial and marital life, the zazavavindrano hides her alterity and comply with human laws, unless her secret is betrayed by her husband, setting off her vigilante violence.
In the charcoal settings ofthe artist’s works, the zazavavindrano are guides and guardians placed in the ocean, mirroring the sky with new astrological constellations. Their soft, undulating gills are adorned with antennae allowing connection between the terrestrial world and the spiritual realm. For the artist, their powers are transmitted and embodied in the ordinary and heroic gestures of the inhabitants of successor territories to the vanished continent, following the example of Mauritian women who donated their hair to enable the manufacture of vines capable of soaking up the oil spill which occurred at Pointe d’Esny in 2020.The hair material, composed of porous, resistant scales, helped protect the lagoon from oil pollution.
The mermaid archetype can be traced back to the collective imagination of present-day Lemuria through an extraordinary funeral procession recounted by anthropologist Thomas Mouzard: in2001 in Madagascar, the remains of an aye-aye (a protected species belonging to the lemur family) were honored for three months with funeral rites and the apposition of numerous epithets throughout the island’s villages, including that of the sacred ancestor or razamasy. The body, it was said, was that of a woman-with-gills who had approached fishermen to share their drink, but was killed by one of them, terrified by her weirdness.
In the installation “Déterrer les sorcières” [Unearthing the Witches], the artist also covers gallows with the hair of healers to evoke the torment by fire inflicted during witch hunt times. Grand Mère Kal, who is associated with the image of a slave woman, is a recurring character in zistoir (a form of count and legend in La Réunion island). In some versions of her legend, she is hunted down and throws herself into the Piton de la Fournaise, only to be reborn as a witch, transfigured by fire. Unlike her mermaids, Magalie Grondin’s witches are absent from the work, which stages the instrument of their death. These victims, often women perceived as the repositories of knowledge that marginalizes them, are invoked in the exhibition space, in the negatives of the object of their disappearance, as if to cause us to think about the process of dehumanization undertaken by their communities. This phenomen on continues to affect dispossessed and locked-up women of all ages in many parts of the world.
The incursion of these marginal women as the main characters of the exhibition’s fonnkèr also evokes the subversive impulse of the destiny promised to what writer Colette Cosniercalls the “woman who melted away”, whose individuality is dissolved in social roles that subjugate her, relativize her individuality and ignore her desires. The “Moon Talk” installation allows us to hear the words of women living in polygamous marriages and family units in Cameroon, Mayotte, Madagascar and La Réunion. In this maze of fabrics, we learn about the conditions of their intimate life itineraries, from one territory to another, amidst the mesh of religious and social traditions that place their role as co-wives at the center of their existence. They disclose their strategies for resilience in so many breaches that reveal their personal aspirations, through almost inexorable trajectories.
Alix Pornon
Artistic and cultural programming officer at Cité internationale des arts in Paris