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SIGHTINGS 34
Michaëlle Sergile. Photo: kimura byol lemoine. Marie-Célie Agnant. Photo: Alain Lefort.
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SIGHTINGS 34: CONVERSATION BETWEEN MICHAËLLE SERGILE AND MARIE-CÉLIE AGNANT

Thursday, May 5, 4 PM
At the Gallery
Free, in French

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Join artist Michaëlle Sergile for a presentation of her project SIGHTINGS 34: Lalo as macoute, followed by a conversation with Quebec and Haitian author Marie-Célie Agnant. They will discuss the artist’s installation and the author’s novel, Un alligator nommé Rosa (2007), exploring each in their own way the Haitian figure of the Fiyet Lalo(Fillette Lalo, or Lalo Girl).

Sergile and Agnant will focus more specifically on the figure of “Rosa,” a militiawoman known by several names who inspired both the artist’s installation and the author’s novel. Under the theme of fiction as a place for reality in-the-making, this exchange will offer reflections on gender, oral history and metaphors associated with the “Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale” (National Security Volunteers or “VSN”), a paramilitary force active during the Duvalier dynasty in Haiti.

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Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite through weaving the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, or communities living in diverse intersections. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.

Between her poems, short stories, novels and children’s literature, Marie-Célie Agnant has built a substantial body of work that has been translated into several languages and is deeply anchored in memory and recollection. Falling at once under the sign of poetry and the violence of postcolonial societies, her writing underscores the fundamental condition she has set for herself: the refusal of spectatorship, complacency, and programmed forgetting. Finalist of the Desjardins Literary Prize (1995), the Governor General’s Literary Award (1997), in 2014 she received the SODEP Prix de Création en prose and, in 2017, the Alain Grandbois Prize for her book of poetry Femmes des terres brûlées.

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SIGHTINGS 34

This public program is part of SIGHTINGS 34, presented from January 26 2022 to May 15 2022 on the ground floor of the Hall Building of Concordia University: 1455, blvd. De Maisonneuve West, accessible weekdays and weekends from 7 am to 11 pm.