Delphine et Elodie Chevalme

Visual Arts

Houston

“Make Archives Open Sources! Make Archives A Critical Space!”

Twin sisters, our artistic duo naturally formed around drawing and image-making. Our projects are shaped by both geographical and artistic movement, engaging with social and identity issues, postcolonial research, history in general, and the history of population movements in particular. We address questions of domination and power dynamics, and how to overturn them through processes of deconstruction, emancipation, demystification, debinarization, making visible, and inventing…

For over eight years, we have been developing Mama Whita, a body of work centered on French colonial history that brings “archives into action.” Carried out through a dual approach—archival research and the restoration–transposition of the archive through drawing—the project sits at the crossroads of scientific and artistic practice, with drawing as its backbone. Producing images from colonial archives is not a neutral act. Through this gesture, we restore them and return them to a contemporary life where a new narrative is reconstructed with each use.

A duo of visual artists based in Saint-Denis and represented by Galerie 8+4, they have been developing a multidisciplinary practice centered on drawing, photography, and image production techniques for about fifteen years. Their work was first discovered in 2011 at the Salon de Montrouge. Since then, they have been engaged in long-term research projects. They exhibit both in France and internationally, most recently at the Musée Théodore Monod in Dakar and the Musée du Quai Branly, among others.

What?

Off-screen is a visual and plastic investigation on the off-screen histories of the Southern United States, made from Houston, its inhabitants and its communities.

By combining the photographic archives of Southwest Texas at the Sam Houston Center, the University of Houston archives covering one hundred years of the city and regional history, the community records of local associations and documents from La Contemporaine library in Nanterre, France, where the Daniel Guérin collection covering post-war America and the civil rights issue is preserved, we will give another life to the archives. Compared in a sensitive, anachronic and popular manner they will become a support for producing collective stories based on a field survey in Houston and surroundings, sharing the silenced voices; a sort of decolonial and pluriversal image production for a past still in the making.

The project will include setting up a dialogue with the members of the Afro-American, Amerindian or Mexican communities and with practices originating from American popular cultures – country music, rodeos and cowboys – to restore the silenced stories of this American territory, sometimes overtaken by revisionist and segregationist movements. In an inclusive and polyphonic perspective, the project will suggest seeing and hearing the point of view of Houston’s population in the form of a subject of dialogues based on writings, photographs, press clippings, oral or fictive stories, songs, collected items, manufactured objects where creation is thought of as a counter-archive tool part of a popular approach in which what counts is making memory and repairing it. By multiplying the approaches, according to the anti-globalization and Zapatista utopia we can build a world in which several worlds are possible – not a universal but a « pluriversal » world.

The artistic forms considered will be based on the superposition, reconstitution and reconstruction processes.

Where?

We imagined Off-screen in Houston, Texas in this same perspective and around the issue of archives as a social item.

Locating the project in Texas matches perfectly our work themes. The choice was carefully made, considering in particular the history of the area marked by colonization, numerous wars and the successive attachments to several kingdoms or states, as well as a permanent relation to the border, be it internal when thinking of the racial segregation that lasted until the sixties, or external when thinking of the regular arrival of migrants from its border to Mexico.

That’s why we’ll be running the project in Houston and the surrounding area (Galveston, Brenham, Rosenberg, Crosby…) and a few specific Texas towns such as Brownsville and Fort Worth.

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