A collective exhibition with and around Sonia Chiambretto, with Ouassila Arras, Agata Ingarden, Hannan Jones, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Luna Mahoux, Josèfa Ntjam, Fanny Souade Sow, Virgil Vernier.
Curatorial accomplices: Victorine Grataloup and Camille Ramanana Rahary, assisted by Léo Ferreiro and Clara Juan
February 8 – June 8, 2025; public opening on February 7 from 5 to 10 PM
Panorama, Friche la Belle de Mai
A slab of concrete and a smoking air vent occupy the middle of the exhibition space. These are the set pieces for Sonia Chiambretto’s Oasis Love (2023). Like all of the author and poet’s texts, this play multiplies points of view and features several voices, often childlike or youthful. Some of them appear in the bay window and on the facing wall, in the form of quotes.
On Oasis Love, Sonia Chiambretto writes:
“It all started with a poem.
I was in residence in Seine-Saint-Denis in a youth hostel. It was springtime, and I was walking between the apartment buildings with Bintou and two of her school friends. We went into a grocery store to buy cans of Tropical Oasis. After leaving, we stumbled on the brutal arrest of some local youths. We got closer, and the girls recognized one of their cousins. …
I list, I count, I take inventory.
Using a montage of documents, archives, and collected lyrics, in a syncopated chronology, I seek a poetic form, rejecting the linearity of a story or a demonstration, which reveals the ambiguity of our relationship with authority. …
Writing moves the framing; it’s visual, almost plastic, I think. I like to say that a word, a single, specific word, depending how it’s placed on the page, can cause an explosion. …
From the experience of the page to the performance space to the stage, Oasis Love is nothing more than the continued exploration that I collectively carry out with my tools: writing, performing arts, and more recently, visual arts. It’s also a way for me to reconnect with my own family history, repeatedly traumatized throughout history by the French police force’s wrongdoings.”
Twenty years after the 2005 urban riots—a significant event in contemporary French history, following the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who, with Muhittin Altun, were fleeing a police checkpoint in Clichy-sous-Bois—the exhibition brings together artists close to Sonia Chiambretto as well as new collaborations. The eight visual artists share not only Sonia Chiambretto’s interest in working-class, urban neighborhoods and the issues specific to their youth, but also some of the author’s methodologies: collecting archives, testimonies, amplification through repetition.
In the Panorama, the centrality of the theater set, of a stage, materializes the ambition—dear to Sonia Chiambretto’s writing and directing—to place the spoken word at the heart of the exhibition Like Spring, I will be many, and to experience its proximity with visual artworks. This stage, on which anyone can stand, will be regularly activated by performances, readings, and workshops.
Like Spring, I will be many
Feb 8 – Jun 8, 2025
Triangle-Astérides
Marseille, France
