Moukimbi Moukengui

Marcos Avila Forero

5 Oct 2013 — 4 Jan 2014

The work of the French-Colombian artist Marcos Avila Forero deals with the complex and sometimes violent reality. He makes a personal and artistic commitment within the context of such political and social situations. His work embodies these experiences, tales and journey. These micro-fictions made from hodgepodge, try less to demonstrate or to inform than to confront temporalities and geographies which should not have met.

Palenqueros, 2013, is a series of emblematic drums from Palenque culture, community of black fugitives from the colonial era of rebel territories in Latin America. These instruments are adapted from Bantu drums. Following Marcos Avila Forero’s investigation of displacement and migration’s logics, they have been made by craftsmen in Dordogne, where Galleons of the triangular trade found their supplies.

The single-channel video Cayuco, 2012, produced in Morocco near Oujda stages the journey of a “Cayuco’s plaster replica. A cayuco is a boat known for the crossing of clandestine in the Mediterranean Sea. The replica has been dragged on the road for several days between the closed Algerian border and the Spanish enclave of Melilla which is the ultimate African step of the immigrants; the sculpture wears out gradually and leaves tracks in the trail of its journey up to the mountain of Gourougou. At the end of the trip, it meets with the people who failed here, over Melilla, hidden, some for years, in expectation of "the right moment" to try to pass.

*Moukimbi Moukengui is the latin-like translation of the words "travel" and "roots" from the Ndjabi language, a variation of the Bantou language used in Congo and Gabon.