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Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette Solo Exhibition

    Media Gallery-Section A, CICA Museum
    June 7-11, 2023
    2023.06.07-11

    TOLOMAN

    From the Cannaceae family, native to the Caribbean and tropical America, the toloman of its scientific name Canna Indica, is a plant widespread in all tropical regions of the globe. This is a tuber, edible, with healing properties against pain mainly/

    Lavi sé pa on bol toloman says the Martinican Creole proverb. Life is not a bowl of toloman — this soft, silky porridge concocted for infants and the elderly, an ointment with many therapeutic properties. Life is not a long calm river as the French saying goes. This speaks to how far is the figuration of existence is from a sinecure. There is the malaise of a between-two-shores feeling, of a triple consciousness deprived of completeness and the need of healing. Of reparations. The reparations of slavery spill ink and saliva; and to date, it is probably complex to define the act or acts to carry out in suture, in cauterization of an unsurpassable history. There is a relationship to this land, which was first of gehenna and alienation, of re-weaving and creolization, of metaculture and phenotypic-social metabolisms.

    The Toloman, therefore, is the figuration of a desired cure. The figuration of a fundamental healing that can be self-administered, in the very sense of the revival of the rimèd razyé  using for self-medication in these islands, i.e. the return to a pharmacopoeia made of local and/or endemic medicinal herbs and plants.

    Around the symbolism of this rhizome, the Toloman exhibition implicitly explores the theme of repairing history, while creating a new relationship with the environment of our territories. From the exorcism of the shadows of chlordecone to the appropriation of this land of sequels, passing through the mythification of the elements through diasporic and memorial mythologies, through Pan-African ancestry. Or else, ecofeminism, a key filter to understand the stance chosen throughout those videos and performances.

    Nèfta Poetry (aka Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette) is a performer, dancer-choreographer, poetess and independent scholar. She has been exhibiting her work for a few years now, through the exhibitions and hosting festival she has been curating. CRI DE FEMMES is a Feminist festival she founded in the French territories and Paris, interculturally discussing with other cities (New Delhi India, Havana Cuba, United States…) since 2012. With the pandemic, her exhibiting video performances multiplied: a way of transposing immaterially her body and art in other spaces. This medium has taken a bigger place in her work. Still, she remains an in vivo performer artists so as her proposals to be fully received, as they often entail a multisensorial dimension, left incomplete through the audiovisual medium. Among the themes redundant in her practice — of which are environmental performances, are memory, ecology, sexuality/feminism and some more in the postcolonial sphere, and from the francophone Caribbean to the world.