Caroline Déodat

My project for Villa Albertine is entitled Sans innocence or the Logic of the Proxy. It takes the form of a two-act film conceived as a poetic inquiry into the fictions of justice and its blind spots. I am interested in how innocence has been historically constructed, instrumentalized, and placed in the service of relations of domination, from slavery to contemporary surveillance technologies.

The first act, Sans innocence, follows a character navigating between intimate memory and historical strata, revisiting in particular the foundations of the presumption of innocence: the 1256 ordinance promulgated by Saint Louis, the Crusades and their colonial aftermath, the founding of Saint-Louis in Senegal and Saint Louis in Missouri, and so on. These moments recall how innocence was long used as an ideological mask, reducing colonized peoples to juridical infantilization and depriving them of any legitimate voice.

The second act, The Logic of the Proxy, brings this questioning into the present. The character seeks to prove their innocence in a world saturated with images: cameras, databases, facial recognition. Yet these proofs are themselves filtered through centuries of racial hierarchies and epistemic biases. The proxy, as an invisible relay, becomes a central futuristic metaphor: can it open a path toward justice when the systems of proof are built upon a racialized geography of the visible, or is it merely another instrument of control that further distances speech? How can one escape the mechanics of modern sacrifice?

This project draws on my research into post-memory and the spectral forms of testimony. The film seeks to invent a cinematic language capable of inhabiting the zones of impossible testimony: an in-between where the ghost persists and where justice may be redefined.

The residency will unfold primarily in St. Louis and Chicago, two cities where questions of justice, memory, and visibility intersect in acute ways, at the very heart of my project.

St. Louis holds a central place because of its racial and legal history. Founded in the name of King Louis IX—a figure associated with the development of the presumption of innocence—the city illustrates how this notion could be invested with ideological weight. It was also the site of the Dred Scott case, a decisive moment in the history of racial injustice in the United States. During the residency, I will conduct archival research at the Missouri Historical Society Library, the Research Center of St. Louis, and the archives of the Gateway Arch Museum, which preserve documents related to the case and to the city’s history. These materials will allow me to interrogate how the law disqualified Black speech, reducing the enslaved body to silent evidence rather than admissible testimony.

My work will continue in Chicago, a city marked by a history of surveillance and struggles for racial justice. There, I will explore the question of visual evidence through collaborations with collectives such as the Invisible Institute, which investigates police violence using OSINT methods.

This research builds on contemporary theoretical contributions—from Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to Judith Butler—that reveal how racist regimes of visibility organize both the erasure and the hyper-exposure of Black lives. By confronting historical archives with contemporary technologies, I aim to develop a filmic work that makes perceptible the continuities between the slaveholding past, structural racism, and the visual construction of justice.