L’Art est une Boxe : De la performance, du politique.

The Team

  • Julie Peghini +

    Anthropologist, filmmaker, lecturer

    Julie Peghini is an anthropologist and filmmaker, lecturer at the University of Paris 8, member of CEMTI. She works on the relationship between the arts and politics in Africa and the Indian Ocean (she is the author of the book Ile rêvée, île réelle : le multiculturalisme à l'île Maurice, 2016). From 2018 to 2021, she co-directed with Dominique Malaquais a research-creation project, Yif Menga, on performance in the Africas. Together, they co-constructed a cycle of events, including the festival Afriques: Utopies performatives at the Cité internationale des Arts ( September 2021). Insurrection du verbe aimer (2019), about the poetry and contemporary legacy of writer Sony Labou Tansi, is her first feature documentary. Julie is the assistant director of the EUR ArTeC University Research School, a training and research center dedicated to creation.  

  • Zora Snake +

    Dancer, choreographer, performance artist 

    Of Cameroonian origin, Zora Snake is the founder of the international festival MODAPERF, the space Labo-Modaperf (laboratory of artistic research and manufacture of imaginary futures), and creator of the artistic association the Company Zora Snake, He is the author of several artistic and choreographic works known as: "Transfrontalier", "Je suis", "Au-delà de l'humain", "Le départ", "Les séquelles de la colonisation" ... is one of the most promising artists of the current contemporary scene in Africa.

    On October 3, he won the Golden Artistic awards, organized by Brukmer magazines in Brussels (Belgium) after being the winner in 2019, he got the first prize, Acogny d’or, for the choreographic competition Africa simply the Best by Bobo Dioulasso (Burkina Faso), visa for creation in 2017. He was in residence for his project « Les masques tombent » of which he was a 2020-2021 winner of the Goethe Institute. He is currently in the new choreographic creation of Serge Aimé Coulibaly entitled "Wakatt" on tour 2022-2023.

    Zora Snake's real name is TEJEUTSA, which in his traditional language Yemba from western Cameroon means "a person with strong empathy".

    Zora Snake is also a researcher and teacher. After his research in dance at the School of Sands (Senegal), the Sony Labou Tansi space (Congo-Brazzaville), the Njara'art space (Madagascar), in Burkina-Faso and his multiple encounters with choreographers of French-speaking Africa, multiple international artistic collaborations, he became the creator of his own projects in Cameroon and internationally.

    Also coming from the street, from hip-hop, he is inspired by his territory and his origins. Through a committed poetico-political dance, accompanied most of the time by texts of well-known authors and sometimes written by the artist himself, his creations testify of the most worrying issues of our time.

    A profound work on the quest for self through cultural reappropriation (artistic and ritual practice), Zora Snake lends his body as a place of confrontation to overcome all North-South divides. The multiple challenges the artist faces within the Cameroonian territory, in Africa and in Europe inspire the action of creating works and transforming them in the public space and in inappropriate places to move minds and break the borders and prejudices of our time.

The Project

  • "Transfrontalier" +


    A performance by Zora Snake is entitled "Transfrontalier". The artist asks a fundamental question: How to free oneself from borders?

    And, in search of answers, he exposes in the public space his body, crossed by the hopes, the pains, the obstacles marking the route of those that our politicians, often to denigrate them, name the "migrants". Conceived as an artistic investigation, this danced performance questions real and imaginary, geographical and mental borders, in Europe as well as in Africa. Accompanied by texts read by playwrights and poets and a soundtrack that plays political speeches on migration, "Transfrontalier", says Snake, wants to "fight to move minds". 

  • Description of the project +

     

    To move minds. This is the objective of the project that Zora Snake and Julie Peghini are proposing as part of the residency at Camargo. Together, the artist and the researcher wish to lay the groundwork for a collective work dedicated to Zora Snake's boxing-creation processes.

    The focus of their dialogue is to reflect on performance as a means of creating shared spaces of contestation, reflection and collaboration - spaces that transcend physical and disciplinary boundaries.


    The title of the book is L’art est une boxe : de la performance, du politique. It will explore, via the work of performance of Zora Snake, the possibilities of a world rid of barriers which, in this third decade of the third millennium, are going to accumulate, splitting more and more radically a world that is lived less and less in common. A multifaceted proposal, the work will bring together interviews, essays by researchers, bills and fictions, as well as an important photographic corpus.


    While the work "Transfrontalier" will be central to the book, it will not be the only focus. Three key projects - one of which, "Les séquelles de la colonisation," is itself composed of three parts - will structure the proposal, all of which have movement as their theme: movement of bodies, objects and hopes in the present and over the long term. Bodies of "migrants", as we have seen, but also of slaves, forced laborers, political prisoners; objects of art and ritual looted during the colonial era and, since then, subjected to a museum immobility taking away their strength, possibilities and futures; hopes of freedom (freedom of movement, freedom of speech) hindered but also reappropriated...