School of Beauty / Educational Workshops / Flourished Schoelcher

One of the aspects of the Carte Blanche project lies in the desired interaction of the works produced on this occasion with the pieces from the Schoelcher Museum Collection.
The spectacularly large white plaster sculptures, copies of classical statues enthroned in the Collection reunited by Victor Schoelcher himself, are emblematic of the white domination established in the history of art and the conception of beauty that follows.
Rather than challenging the axiom of an aesthetic equivalence between all cultures by replacing these great casts with other aesthetic references (African, Asian or other), I wanted to "deseuropeanise", hybridize, creolise, to untie the white and the reference to the classic and the beautiful. By blurring the tracks of belonging and appearance, we operate as a return on a history of domination, an attempt to change the classics, to imagine a "repaired" reference system .

This approach is conducted during workshops with school children, some of whose work is exposed.

I am quite surprised that it works. By adding graphic and scarification geometric elements to reproductions of large sculptures, they have "improved" them, made them "more beautiful", they have enhanced the feeling of beauty they provoke, passed the first reactions of surprise and rejection sometimes, especially concerning the discovery of scarification images. The hybrid representations, scarified, tattooed, are more beautiful than the classics.
Repository decentralized, rebalanced. Repair. QED.

An abolitionist convinced by his first direct confrontation with slavery, Victor Schoelcher is the symbol of humanist progress for some people, and for others the alienating hypocrisy of the colonial system.
He therefore perfectly represents the contemporary "white" people, indebted if not guilty of the crimes of domination from which he inherits : an individual perpetually pulled by a past - which is not his, but ours - making him ashamed of an ignoble worldview.

The bronze is thus whitened with the racial scam, in front of all Moun brilé.

HD video of 12'40s.

Displayed during the exhibition, this film presents the various processes used for the exhibition, in order to underline their meanings, their relation with the world and the place of the artist.

REPARATIONS - la fabrique du noir from Francois PIQUET on Vimeo.

The "Reparations" exhibition is formalized around 5 axes:

- A skull without face / Reliquaries
- Reparations / Simulacra
- The factory of black / Moun Brilé
- The School of Beauty / Educational Workshops
- What can be saved