Expression(s) décoloniale(s) #4, Musée d'histoire de Nantes - Château des ducs de Bretagne

Three remarkable figures, working at the contemporary intersection of history, art, and memory, have accepted the museum’s invitation.

Beninese historian Lylly Houngnihin, and founder and director of Totems Afrikaraïbes, will engage visitors with a series of roughly ten texts interweaving history, memory, poetry, culture, and emotion. By connecting them to a selection of objects from the museum’s permanent itinerary, her approach to its collections will be both cross-disciplinary and deeply personal: “My work explores objects as vessels of memory, revealing what I call ‘Atlantic persistences’: the symbolic, visual, and ritual forms that circulated from Africa to other territories, often despite the extreme violence of the slave trade. Objects thus become vehicles of experience, embodying stories of loss and displacement, but also of aesthetic, social, and cultural reinvention.”

From São Paulo, Rosana Paulino is a leading figure in Brazil’s contemporary art scene. For this year’s Expression(s) Décoloniale(s), she will take over different sections of the permanent collection with roughly ten major works. Whether it is through drawing, painting, sculpture, video, or installation, she will offer visitors multiple perspectives, while dialoguing with the museum’s historical documents and paying tribute to Afro-Brazilian women. Were female victims of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery victims like any other? What specific forms of violence were inflicted upon them? What fundamental role did they play in passing on knowledge they had inherited from the African continent? Finally, behind their silence and denial, what kind of resilience enabled them to endure? Through her work, Paulino sheds light on what persists and what disappears.

Finally, Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop will present two emblematic series of photos. The first, entitled “Diaspora”, is inspired by portraits painted between the 15^th and 19^th centuries, highlighting individuals who crossed over the fault lines of European colonial history during the modern era. The agency of these Africans, who were either victims or actors of this past, is thus foregrounded, and their individuality becomes a source of strength. The second series, entitled “Liberty”, evokes key, foundational moments in Black protest movements worldwide from a historical perspective — from anti-colonial struggles in the Caribbean to those waged on the African continent, and on to anti-segregation movements and contemporary demonstrations against racist violence.