FOCUS: ‘Mangrovité’ Book Signing with Chris Cyrille-Isaac

Join us for a book-signing and refreshments in conjunction with our current exhibition by Kelly Sinnapah Mary, guest curated by Sour Grass as part of our gatherings and passages collaboration.

In this program we will be joined by critic, curator and editor Chris Cyrille-Issac who joins us from Paris to launch the new book Mangrovité. This book emerges from an exhibition cycle that took place, in part, with the Palais de Tokyo and in a dialogue with the work of artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary. In a collaborative imagination among artists, writers and poets from the Caribbean, the book re-visits the notion of a ‘Caribbean Theory’ with the novel idea of Mangrovité, referring to the asthetics and mode of being of the coastal Mangrove forest.

As Cyrille-Isaac notes: "Mangrovity is a poetic-political matter coming straight out of the history of patriarchal colonialism, it’s malgrove, it is soleil-énergie, and stinking mud, it is the opposite of the mangrophily of a certain neo-colonial ecological discourses (which, under the pretext of «preserving», remove and invisibilize populations and cosmogonies). Free from the experts, you find yourself dreaming about the mangrove and walking through its secrets and pirate lines – like those dream-shelters that Kelly Sinnapah Mary is making right now or like the Makouvia Kokou Ferdinand forest where everyone gets lost."

This program takes place with the support of the Mangrovity Art Fund and the Edouard Glissant Foundation.