Minia Biabiany’s practice weaves together questions of habitat, human and more-than-human bodies, and language. She creates poetical immersive environments that call audiences to read and feel within the layered colonial histories and their legacies, questions the relations with spaces – both mental space and places –, and reappropriates learning and healing methods as tools. By unearthing traces of the colonial plantation and assimilation systems that continue to impact the archipelago of Guadeloupe, she often uses plants as guides to look at silence, lost knowledge, or forgotten remnants. While crossing her installations, the viewer is invited to engage and project with personal and collective narrative threads kept partly open. Biabiany builds “choreography for the gazes,” and asks for presence, for a change in our rhythm of perception and attention. Her different installations are thought of as phrases continuing one chanting.
In Guadeloupean creole, zyé an kann, meaning “eye of sugarcane,” refers to the nodes marking the stem of the sugarcane with root bands and from which a new sprout can grow. Biabiany plays with that common say and with no stems, turns the sugarcane nods into 400 eyes looking at us and tearing dried sugarcane leaves. Those gazes are a possibility to see and be seen by the women and men enslaved who were forced to cultivate sugarcane fields, but also connect with lineage and passing memories. Working on her connection with her female lineage for several years, Biabiany proposes here what she calls “punctuations”, small ceramics hung, operating like metaphors or quotes related to objects, figures, emotions, and stories of the women who came before her. Their verticality responds to the flat horizontal water containers reflecting all parts of the ceiling. Those circles of black water are doors to look at from different perspectives, but also directly integrate our image into what surrounds us. The soil is above us, close, talkative but whispered. Woven to all those elements, the sound of the entire installation is a collaboration with the sound designer Thierry Girard aka Thyeks, whose proposition is structured in three movements like a natural cycle: the initial call (awakening of the living, deep, slow resonances); the migration (evolving textures, fluid movement); and the dispersion (fragmentation and propagation in space with unpredictable echoes).
It is not a flourishing garden that welcomes us, but the extractive practice of monoculture. Introduced during the colonial era, that practice of planting, cultivating, and harvesting single crops such as sugarcane, cotton, and plantain has led to the erosion and destruction of soils. The sugarcane field is not only defined by containment and extraction but also by chosen moments of opacity, where figures defiantly choose to remain unseen. Evoking scenes of escape, maroonage, and concealment, these disembodied eyes, and the voices that trail them, symbolize the designed opacity of rural Black space.