Flashmag January 2021 www.flashmag.net
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I discovered mud at the age of eight, a simple Christmas present but one that would turn my life upside down. I copied a small African figurine of my grandmother and everyone was impressed.
I continued thereafter, I liked this contact so much (I was rather reserved, so small and asthmatic, earth was a material that suited me perfectly to express myself) and I started to say that I wanted to be an artist.
I was understood by my parents (who loved me with unconditional love) and encouraged me by having a parallel level of study, to pursue my dream.
Your apprenticeship you will do in a way, I would say methodical. After a baccalaureate in visual arts, then a detour to the faculty of art history, you learn sculpture in Rome, Italy, with Jean Chauchard, pupil of Paul Belmondo, then it will be a stone cutting school and architecture in Volvic in France and sculpture courses with Gigi Guadagnucci, grand master of marble, in Massa-Carrara in Tuscany. If in a nutshell you had to say how this journey influenced the artist you have become, what would you say?
I was self-taught for a long time, not finding anyone qualified enough in small workshops to teach me the anatomy of the human body. Because I wanted to master the human body in mud to perfection in order to be able to “tell faithfully.” After my apprenticeship and my internships, the body revealed itself to me in a completely different way: from the skeleton, muscles, flesh, veins, skin ... I was really going to be able to finally express myself with all the emotion I had inside me. I can't say that I was influenced, my style is very different from the two masters I learned with, but they gave me the knowledge I needed.
Does the technique acquired during the apprenticeship has an influence on the style of inspiration, or the methodology acquired, is just a way, a means of expressing your art?
Exactly it was only a matter of knowledge to be mastered and to know how-to set-in motion, I also learned to cut stone to confirm that my material is really the mud. This earth that lives under our feet, knows how to give birth or to make things die, this living matter ... our mother earth quite simply.
Why have you often said that it is your masculine energy that allows you to create?
You know this famous Ying and Yang, I also insist a lot to be named sculptor, not feminine. I am very feminine in everyday life but in creation it seems to me that it is my masculine strength that comes into action.
Being a woman and a sculptor does this influence your sensitivity to creation if so, how?
This is a great question that is difficult to answer. I am very very sensitive, but is it due to the fact that I am a woman? I don't think so, a lot of men are too. I have nothing to prove. I do what I have to do. On the other hand, it often surprises that it is a woman who creates these sculptures because of the dimension (I create on a human scale so that we can "dialogue" with my sculptures). And it surprises all the more that I am on site during demonstrations around the memory of slavery; I’m always militant. This is where everything takes on its meaning. I do not sculpt in order to do sculpture, I campaign through art.
And has the profession of sculptor influenced the woman you are apart from seducing guys with your talent? (Laughs)
I'm not sure I only seduce "guys" by my talent (laughs) and fortunately!
But I admit that it impresses men, not just my creation but the way I defend it.
Yes, my job has influenced my whole way of life, first of all because I work a lot, this job has made me a persevering being, courageous in every sense of the word ... I also receive a lot of violent criticisms or insults in relation to the subject which I chose to relate. Not even afraid (laughs)
But it kept me above all in hope, the love of life, gentleness too.
Mixed or Zoréole more precisely, that is to say born from a mother from Auvergne and a father from the Reunion Island, how did this duality, if you understand it that way, influence the artist that you are?
Although fairly fair skinned, I have a hair or mane that does not deceive.
I made a great wealth of this interbreeding. At home we did not speak of descendants of slaves, as in many families; it is a painful subject, a shame or even of the past ... I will summarize very quickly because it is much more complex.
I feel the volcanoes vibrate in me, those of Reunion Island and those of Auvergne.
To be Mixed is to be neither white nor black so it is not easy to know where to be, but what pride! Suddenly I feel universal. It made me strong in my art because I chose to create a place for myself, my place - the one, which speaks beyond borders.
Congolese Musician Papa Wemba under the lens of Bill Akwa Betote
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