On Heirloom, Chambers writes:

Dance precisely works on the preservation, continuation, and emergence of embodied archives. It is an inheritance of “doing” that only occurs in the transmission between bodies. Our bodies synchronously hold the latent and the emergent—our archive has always been in the making and it is arriving right now. This work sifts through an archive of dance heirlooms, both inherited through family and learned through a life as a contemporary dancer. Held by the structure of the Electric Slide, it is a real-time calling up of a personal dance history lodged in the flesh.

Video documentation of Chambers’ performance will be integrated into the exhibition, which continues until April 1st.

The Archive as Speculative Site

In her exhibition, Denise Ryner queries the different forms archives take and the ways of representing them. We start with the idea that a minority diasporic archive is by nature dispersed in space and time, that it is composite and impure. Consequently, it’s not about discovering, excavating, or exhuming—terms that call to mind the epistemologies of colonial modernities—but of ceaselessly inventing new vocabularies to produce, assemble, compose, even perform with the fragile means at the disposal of those who need them. If we ask about necessity—by whom and for whom do we return to the archive?—it is because it leads us to the question of transmission. The hypothesis of this lecture is that it is possible to imagine forms of apparition, practice, and transmission specific to this minority archive that evade capture and fetishism and permit the initiation of coming communities. The archive then is more than an object to make visible, which may well require a bit of obscurity and secrecy. It becomes then a speculative site to inhabit, space for the rehearsal of a desirable future.

Olivier Marboeuf is an author-storyteller, theorist, and film producer originally from Guadeloupe. With Yvan Alagbé he founded Éditions Amok (later Frémok) in the 1990s, publishing research-based comics, and after the visual art and live literature centre Espace Khiasma, 2004 to 2018. He currently divides his time between speculative writing, drawing, and film production with Spectre Productions. He recently published Suites Décoloniales : s’enfuir de la plantation and the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, both with Éditions de Commun. A large selection of his texts can be found on his blog Toujours Debout.

Writer, artist, and researcher, Stéphane Martelly was born in Port-au-Prince and has lived in Montreal since 2002. Intertwining critical reflection and creation, she has published numerous books, essays, poetry, and other fables. With Albin Christen, she realized the book La maman qui s’absentait (Vents d’ailleurs, 2011), which received the Michel Tournier literary prize. Her key work, Les jeux du dissemblable (Nota Bene, 2016), draws on contemporary Haitian literature to bring forward a reflection on creation. Her latest fable Comme un trait / Le fil d’or et d’argent (artist’s book, 2022) informed the multidisciplinary research-creation project Tresser la ligne (Claudia Brutus, Ji-Yoon Han, Dominique Fontaine). Her transdisciplinary practice interrogates zones of obscurity and the limits of representation and interpretation. In 20-21, she founded the Martiales et Martiales. Essais pour faire connaître la voix des écrivaines noires émergentes collection with Éditions du Remue-Ménage. Martelly is professor in research-creation and Caribbean literatures in the Department of Arts, Languages and Literature at the University of Sherbrooke and co-director of VersUS, transcultural laboratory.