It all begins with the emblematic Colonnes Pascales, pieces of Moroccan, Chinese, and African dishes piled up after having been used a sound objects in protests, punctuating the space with their muffled presence. These columns open the score of a space in tension organised around the monumental installations Home Sweet Home and Diamondscape. The first, made of bird cages, wooden colonists and papier mâché, evokes a Tower of Babel in the shape of a nest. The second, planted in black sand, is a menacing desert landscape: metallic diamonds hang from vertebrae suspended from gibbet-like structures. If the transcendence of the one expresses the possibility of an ideal, of a utopia to be reached, the immanence of the other throws us back on the reality of our world. Dried out, impoverished nature, recalling the exploitation of mines and men, the diamonds act as so many swords of Damocles in a dead, silent universe: its skies are made up of spools of VHS tape, forever mute.

On the other side, old hybrid mopeds loaded with calabashes, feathers, or horse tails levitate like the objects of desires or dreams for an elsewhere. In the background, a series of dirty, scratched mirrors let zones of shimmering light break through their earthy-coloured surfaces. Surrounded by Sunrises turning about themselves and Pascale’s Eggs in alabaster, the Dirty Mirrors, robbed of their reflective power, invite us into a hellish dance of the world. The travelling shot continues with a neon inscription that has lit up the site’s old boiler room, as battered ventilators turn desperately in a slow race to the last breath. Voodoo Child is the offspring of the ‘voodooisation’ of the world, ‘a succession of rites shaping our way of life, where, somewhere, everything becomes voodoo’, as Pascale Marthine Tayou says.*

*Extract from an ongoing interview with Jérôme Sans