The Words of Negroes
The Words of Negroes
A transmédia project
In a cross-disciplinary approach, the experience the film ‘Paroles de Nègres’ is deployed in a three-dimensional audiovisual installation and complemented by this website: a space of documentation and reappropriation of memory.
The aim is to combine different forms of narrative, to unfold the process of embodiment of the memory, to explore the archive.
The input of photographer Bernard Gomez
The project owes a great deal to photographer Bernard Gomez, who took documentary photographs of the factory and portraits of the workers during the filming. These photographs are featured in the installation, enliven the film credits and enhance the website. The dialogue between photography, moving images and sound at work here is a perfect illustration of the long partnership between the two artists, who have lived and worked together for many years.
Bernard Gomez
He has taught photography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bourges and at the University of Paris-VIII, as well as at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Since 1996 he has been making documentary films with his partner Sylvaine Dampierre. He began working with digital photography in 2005, and now works on long series. His photographs could be described as ‘documentary’, charged with humanity and immersed in an inhabited world. But this immersion in reality is not based on any certainty, nor does it seek to demonstrate anything: it is as much the state of the world as a way of being in the world that is at work here. For him, photography is a construction, the shaping of a benevolent subjectivity.
Sylvaine Dampierre
Sylvaine Dampierre is a filmmaker and visual artist of guadeloupean descent who lives in Paris. Graduate of Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs IN Paris, she worked as an editor before joining Ateliers Varan as a filmmaker trainer. In 2006, she co-founded with Gilda Gonfier the Varan Caraïbe association for the promotion of Caribbean cinema in Guadeloupe, which offers training in documentary filmmaking and promotes Caribbean cinema.
In 2019, she collaborated with Bernard Gomez on a book of photographs exploring the archives and landscapes to evoque traces of maroon slaves (Marronnages, ed LOCO. 2019.Paris) and joint exhibitions (IN SITU, Galerie M Paris, February 2023).
Her films have screened and at festivals including Cinema du Réel in Paris, FID Marseille, Fidocs Chile, DOKLeipzig, Idfa Amsterdam, IFFF Koln…
WEBSITE CREDITS
Conception and contents: Sylvaine Dampierre
Web Design: Carolina Costa
Photographs: Bernard Gomez
Video excerpts courtesy of Athénaise productions
