MARLEY, MUSIC, MORRIS, LIFE: A PHOTO VOYAGE IN PARIS

Reggae fans may be initially drawn just by the iconic image of Bob Marley on the Music + Life poster, but once inside this exhibition, they will find themselves immersed in a world of extraordinary photographs. 

Music + Life is the first retrospective of work by Jamaican-born British photographer Dennis Morris, and it has been pulling in visitors at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, where it runs until May 18th.

A banner on the wall of the museum - located in the bustling, historic Marais area of Paris - shows reggae legend Marley in a relaxed pose, his locks streaming out from under his tam and a playful smile directed at someone the viewer cannot see.

Inside, a vast space is devoted to Marley, with a range of depictions: playing football, performing on stage, laughing in his tour bus, posing with accompanying singers the I-Threes (including wife Rita), sitting solemnly alone with his guitar shortly before his death from cancer in 1981.

But this is only one segment of the exhibition. Music + Life is a look at Morris’ overall career photographing ordinary people in London communities, as well as later portraying Marley, the controversial punk group the Sex Pistols and a gamut of other artists - exploring the “intersection of punk and reggae,” as the curators put it. It’s also about the arc of his own life.

Morris arrived in London from Jamaica at age four in the early 1960s, part of the post-World War II “Windrush generation” of Caribbean immigrants to Britain. He says he developed an interest in photography early, as a choirboy at a church in London’s East End, which had a photo club. 

“The director of the club was a man called Donald Patterson, and he saw my enthusiasm and my potential, and he took me under his wing and basically taught me more or less everything I know,” Morris told SWAN. “He took me to museums, he took me to galleries, and that’s how things started.”

Morris says he began taking pictures in his teens, documenting life in Hackney in the 1970s. Then, one day, he heard that Marley would be performing nearby, and he headed to the venue with his camera, waiting for hours before getting to meet the Jamaican singer, who subsequently invited him to tour with the band. That crucial meeting would lead Morris into the music world, where his photographs would be published by magazines such as Time Out and NME, providing up-close portrayals of Marley, and many others over time.

A major theme of Music + Life is “story-telling”, according to Laurie Hurwitz, who curated the show with MEP’s director Simon Baker (a huge reggae fan and the force behind developing the retrospective in Paris). The aim, Hurwitz said, was to recount Morris’s journey as a young photographer, moving on to his wide-ranging music portrayals, and then his later activity as an art director in the recording industry. 

The exhibition begins with three series Morris photographed as a teenager: Growing up Black, which depicts life in Hackney and its rich Caribbean culture; Southall - documenting London’s Sikh community through an intimate lens; and This Happy Breed - a “blend of humour and resilience that illustrates the spirit of the British working class”.

Morris told SWAN that despite some of the hardships shown in the series, he wanted to focus on the dignity of the communities portrayed, and to give insight into people’s daily lives. 

“What I’m trying to show is that with all the hardships, we had dignity and we had pride,” Morris said. “That’s how we made our way through. It’s like in some ways Nelson Mandela. Despite all the things he went through, he was never bitter and he showed people that no matter what they do to you, you have to hold yourself together, you have to keep your dignity, you have to keep believing in yourself, keep moving forward.” 

Leaving this section, visitors can progress to the portrayals of Marley, with both recognizable images and unfamiliar shots, in black and white as well as vibrant colour. The museum has covered two walls with massive enlargements of portraits of the singer, but equally striking are the smaller framed portraits, where Marley’s aura shines through.

“Bob Marley didn’t need artificial lighting to be photographed,” Morris says. “He had an inner light and you can see that.”

Asked whether he thinks Marley’s legacy is currently being diluted with rampant marketing of his image and work, Morris said he would agree but explained that he tries to ensure his photographs are used in a way that respects the singer’s art.

After the Marley rooms, the exhibition continues with Morris’ photographs of the Sex Pistols, documenting their “turbulent rise to fame”, and their “anarchic image”, to use the show’s description.

Over the course of a year, Morris covered “their chaotic performances as well as their life behind the scenes,” according to the curators. This includes “seminal moments” such as the controversial release of the album Never Mind The Bollocks in 1977 and their cruise down the Thames for the single God Save the Queen during the royal Silver Jubilee that year.

The “in-your-face” atmosphere of this section was intentional because that was the band’s persona, Morris told SWAN. Viewers will find themselves immersed in the stormy energy of the group through the photographs of Syd Vicious and Johnny Rotten, and of their concerts and "energised" fans.

“Bob represented the new youth of Jamaica, and the Sex Pistols represented the new young white generation of Britain,” Morris says. “It’s the ying and the yang. From Bob, I learned spirituality, how to hold my head high, and from the Sex Pistols, I learned how to kick the door down in the face of obstacles.”

The exhibition ends with a section showing the “breadth” of Morris’ career, with photographs of artists such as Patti Smith, Marianne Faithful, Oasis, Grace Jones, French group Les Rita Mitsouko, dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and many others. His work designing album covers and his stint in a band called Basement 5 are also featured.

Before leaving the show, visitors can enjoy a diverse playlist including Marley songs, booming from a huge sound system that the MEP’s own engineers have constructed. The temptation to dance will be hard to resist. - AM / SWAN  

Photos (from top to bottom): a poster on the outside wall of the MEP; Bob Marley by Dennis Morris in Music + Life; a photo from the exhibition; Syd Vicious and Johnny Rotten by Dennis Morris; inside the exhibition. 

BRUSSELS SHOW OFFERS DIVERSE VIEW OF ART HISTORY

It’s like walking through several psychedelic halls of history, where bold colours, electrifying compositions and contagious rhythms hit the senses all at once.

This is When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting – a momentous exhibition running at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium, until Aug. 10, 2025. 

The show places African diasporic art firmly within the global sphere of art history, bringing together some 150 luminous artworks from the past 120 years, by Black artists worldwide who explore daily life and other topics.

“One of the most enduring features of the human condition is the inexhaustible desire to see oneself through visual culture and storytelling,” said Koyo Kouoh, co-curator of the exhibition with Tandazani Dhlakama, and executive director and chief curator of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) – which conceived and organized the exhibition.

“Whether living on the continent or within the vast, impressive African diaspora, Black artists have invested in a spectrum of narratives that encompass the experience of blackness, intentionally rejecting limiting tropes of representation,” Kouoh told journalists as the exhibition opened this month.

According to Zoë Gray, Bozar’s director of exhibitions, When We See Us demonstrates how art history is “plural, diverse, and always intertwined”. She said that when she first saw the exhibition in South Africa, she immediately wanted Bozar to host it as well. (The show has now travelled from MOCAA to Basel, to Brussels. It will move on to Stockholm in October for a 10-month stint in the Swedish capital.)

The paintings – from a timely “insider” perspective – are grouped into sections titled “The Everyday”, “Repose”, “Triumph and Emancipation”, “Sensuality”, “Spirituality”, and “Joy and Revelry”. As visitors wander through these sections, they stroll to an accompaniment of global rhythms (arranged by musician and sound artist Neo Muyanga); and the overall effect is of a lively, panoptic world. 

A feature of the display is the “interconnectedness”, or “inter-generational similarities”, among artists and art styles across the African diaspora. The organizers highlight, for instance, the commonalities between an iconic African American artist such as Romare Bearden (1911-1988) and a South African artist like Katlego Tlabela (born in 1993), by placing their works in juxtaposition.

But this is just one noteworthy element. When We See Us can be viewed as an historic art journey, a parade of artistry, a different way of seeing, an explosion of joy.

The curators say the show’s title is “inspired and derived” from the 2019 miniseries directed by US filmmaker Ava DuVernay, When They See Us, which depicts systemic racial prejudice and violence.

“I like shifting things and flipping things … as a way to continue the conversation,” Kouoh said. “So, flipping ‘they' to ‘we’ allows for a dialectical shift that centres the conversation in a comparative perspective of self-writing, as theorized by Cameroonian political scientist, Professor Achille Mbembe.”

She said it was important for the organizers to show a plurality of experiences and to avoid “reductive” and “myopic” narratives. Pain and injustice are not at the forefront of this exhibition, as black experiences can also be seen “through the lens of joy”. 

As for the choice of figurative painting, this reflects the history of the genre throughout the world and especially amid Black artistic practice, she remarked. 

When We See Us naturally represents a range of countries and regions, with paintings from the African continent, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The canvases include a gamut of large-scale paintings – work by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Cornelius Annor among them – as well as smaller creations such as the introspective “The Reader” by William H. Johnson. 

Many of the artists have lived in different places and reflect an array of influences or associations; Cuban-born Wifredo Lam, for example, was a long-term resident of Paris, and died there in 1982. He was friends with Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, associated with other European artists including Henri Matisse and Joan Miró, and knew Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. In the exhibition, visitors get to see Lam’s striking 1938 work “Femme Violette” up close.

Meanwhile, works by the “kings of Kinshasha” – Congolese artists Chéri Samba and Moké – stand out for their audacious, animated canvases, as well as their satirical themes. 

“They were both pivotal protagonists in the political provocative Zaire School of Popular Painting, a style that developed in Kiinshasha in the 1970s, a decade after Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960,” state the curators. “The work of both artists was focused on the daily life in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

(For a profile of Chéri Samba: https://www.globalissues.org/news/2020/09/28/26874)

Emerging artists are shown with established painters too, and several young artists were present alongside their work at the exhibition’s opening.

In the section “Joy and Revelry”, Netherlands-based British-Nigerian artist Esiri Erherienne-Essi said she wanted to show a different side of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Her painting “The Birthday Party” depicts a group posing for a photograph at a joyful event. Here, she centres a happy-looking Biko, celebrating his niece’s birthday.

In her work, Erherienne-Essi uses photographs from historical archives as a starting point to create her paintings, according to the curators. She brings to the fore “archives and moments from Black people’s lives with vibrant depth, colour and detail, countering the flatness of the Black figures in the Western art historical narratives,” they added.

This idea of reversing the gaze is central to When We See Us – especially in the section “Sensuality”, where artists explore “various levels of pleasure, leisure and desire” with works in a variety of media. Among these, the remarkable “Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night”, by American artist Mickalene Thomas, employs acrylic paint, enamel and rhinestones to depict sexuality.

All the artworks are arranged in such a way as to make visitors feel fully connected to the paintings, said Ilze Wolff, of Cape Town design firm Wolff Architects, responsible for the exhibition’s scenography. Visitors can sit in some sections and become immersed in a particular set of paintings.

Then, emerging from this universe, they are invited to explore further, as the exhibition also offers a timeline, a video archive, and a documentarian area, with a wide selection of books. (The timeline’s starting point is 1805, just after the Haitian Revolution, and it details other important events that have shaped black art history, including the Négritude movement and the Harlem Renaissance.) 

“MOCAA calls this the ‘brain’ of the exhibition,” said Maïté Smeyers, Bozar’s Curatorial Project Coordinator. “In association with the timeline, the curators wanted to have this documentation room, where they’ve put all the important writings on Black art and on the artists that are in the show. We’ve also included some literature, poetry, and other work by African diaspora writers because this has a role in the Black arts consciousness, and it contributes to the Black art movement, the history and the shaping of the fields.”

Visitors can freely browse some 80 books, loaned by Belgian institutions including the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), local library Muntpunt, and art galleries.

"The books on display give a glimpse of the history of research into Black art, as well as of Black literary writing, philosophy, and political thought," said Eva Ulrike Pirker, VUB professor of English and comparative literature. "While the exhibition is temporary, the books, including the beautiful catalogue, which offers reproductions of all the artworks, are in Brussels to stay and available at the partner libraries free of charge."

Pirker said she liked the idea that the exhibition will have a "concrete, lasting impact" on the collections of libraries that have partnered with the show, as it prompted librarians to look into their holdings and acquire new books to fill existing gaps.

Showing the richness of African diasporic art, the documentation section may even spur viewers to seek out more information, as well as related artwork.

“When We See Us is about a historical continuum of Black expression, Black consciousness and joy, and we hope (audiences) will enjoy it,” said co-curator Dhlakama. – AM/SWAN

Photos from top: An Evening in Mazowe by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami; paintings by Romare Bearden - Jazz Rhapsody - and Katlego Tlabela - Upper East Side, New York (Study); The Conversation by Cornelius Annor; Esiri Erheriene-Essi and her painting The Birthday Party; books in the documentation section of the exhibition; a composite picture of members of the curatorial and organization team: (top, L-R) Koyo Kouoh, Zoë Gray, and Tandazani Dhlakama; (bottom row): Maïté Smeyers and Ilze Wolff. Photos by AM/SWAN.

THE CARIBBEAN MOURNS LOSS OF A SINGULAR WRITER

By A. McKenzie and S. Scafe

Jamaican writer Velma Pollard provided a special kind of sunlight in the Caribbean literary space. Known across the region for her warm personality and welcoming nature, she also defied simple classification as she shone beyond genre. The work she has left behind encompasses short stories, poetry, academic writing, and novellas. She was also a keen naturalist photographer. 

An early poem, “A Case for Pause”, reflects on the interconnections between all the forms she used: “Arrest the sense / and let the fancy flow / Without design / collecting cloud and air / petal and leaf … Rein in the fancy now / unleash the sense … constructs and theories not yet pursued / rush in perfected, whole,” she wrote. 

Her sudden death earlier this month, on Feb. 1, has created a huge gap in the lives of those who loved and admired her as a person and poet and who must now draw solace from reading or revisiting her work. Her generosity to other writers, scholars, and artists was legendary in the Caribbean and internationally. In the days and weeks before her passing, and despite her incapacity from a fall and subsequent operation, she took pains to read and comment on work that young writers sent her, carefully and unsparingly collating her responses. 

As fellow Jamaican author and academic Earl McKenzie said after her funeral service on Feb. 21: Dr Pollard “was a friend and supporter of her fellow writers, and we all miss her”. Her long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Wilson, added that the service was “an outpouring of love”.

Born in 1937, in the parish of St. Mary on the north-eastern Jamaican coast, Dr Pollard spent her early years in a rural setting along with siblings that include her equally renowned sister Erna Brodber. 

She later attended Excelsior High School in the capital Kingston, where she won several elocution contests, and she gained a scholarship to continue her studies at the University College of the West Indies, focusing on languages. 

Afterward, she earned a Master's degree in English at New York’s Columbia University, and another Master’s – in education – from McGill in Canada, followed by a PhD in language education at the University of the West Indies (UWI). She would go on to become dean of the education faculty at UWI, inspiring numerous students, while also raising her three treasured children - one of whom has said she was the strongest woman he knew, with the largest circle of faithful friends.

Dr Pollard lent her presence and expertise to important scholarly and literary conferences around the world, often writing about her experiences. She once joked that a self-important critic had remarked that every time she attended a conference, she “just had to write a poem”. But that talent for acute observation and for recording the places she visited and the people she met forms part of the richness of her work. In the poem "Bridgetown", she writes for instance: Because the sea / walks here / this city / hands you heaven. 

She addressed myriad issues in her work: family relationships, gender, colonialism (and its legacies), history, love, injustice. Many of her poems are tributes to the everyday struggles of ordinary women, the unlettered makers of “hot lunches and hot clothes / cooking and stitching miracles / with equal hand”.

Her landmark scholarly publication Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari remains a must-read for linguists and others, while her distinctive fiction - including Considering Woman I & II - places her among the Caribbean’s best short story writers. In 1992, she won the Casa de las Americas Prize for Karl and Other Stories (which is being relaunched this year as a Caribbean Modern Classic by a British-based publisher); and, with Jean D’Costa, she also edited anthologies for young readers, including the essential Over Our Way.

Her poetry stands out for its imagery, symbolism and use of Jamaican Creole, or nation language, with collections such as Crown Point and Other Poems, Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here, The Best Philosophers I Know Can’t Read and Write, and Leaving Traces.

Her work has likewise appeared in a range of international anthologies, including Give the Ball to the Poet, which sought to “represent the past, the present and the future of Caribbean poetry”, as Morag Styles, Professor of Children’s Poetry at Cambridge University and one of the editors of the anthology, said when it was published in 2014.

Years before that, Dr Pollard's writing was included in the ground-breaking 1989 collection Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, edited by Wilson and her sister Pamela Mordecai, and including other acclaimed authors such as Maryse Condé and Merle Hodge.

Then in 2018, one of her stories was translated into Chinese and included in the compilation Queen's Case: A Collection of Contemporary Jamaican Short Stories / 女王案 当代牙买加短篇小说集, among the first such publications in China.

Dr Pollard was perhaps foremost a poet, but she was equally a scholar, editor, educator… an overall literary star. When she contracted meningitis several years ago, messages flowed in from all over the globe (as tributes are now doing upon her passing). 

Following her recovery from that bout with meningitis, she told friends she felt the need to do “something worthwhile every day”, as a way of giving thanks for her survival. Part of this naturally included writing, but it also involved taking care of her extended family and being there for her friends and community.

As her sister Erna said at the farewell service, Dr Pollard got “10 out of 10 out of 10 out of 10” for following the commandment: love thy neighbour as thyself. The work she has left behind may be considered a testament of that love, and light, too. - SWAN

Photos , top to bottom: Dr Velma Pollard at her Kingston home (photo AM/SWAN); the cover of Considering Woman; the cover of Crown Point and Other Poems.

ART OF WEST AFRICA CUTS THROUGH GREY PARIS WINTER

The Cecile Fakhoury art gallery in Paris sits on one of the fanciest streets in the French capital, sharing a neighbourhood with the Élysée Palace – the official residence of the country's president – and Le Bristol hotel, the five-star haunt of film stars and other celebrities.

When you step inside the gallery, however, you quickly forget the ostentatious atmosphere of the area, as the artwork pulls you into another world. Vibrant canvases depicting a range of characters and topics take visitors on a trip to Western Africa, at least as seen through the eyes of the region’s established and emerging artists. 

The Paris gallery is one of three entities set up to showcase art from countries including Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and others. The first Galerie Cecile Fakhoury, which bears the name of its French founder, was launched in Abidjan in 2012, and some six years later, a second space in Dakar, Senegal, was inaugurated, with a showroom in Paris following soon afterward. 

That showroom has now transitioned into the Paris gallery on the "luxury-themed" rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The current exhibition, Le pays de Cocagne, features the work of 10 artists and provides an antidote to the greyness of the French winter, according to gallery director and curator Francis Coraboeuf. 

He says the show is meant to evoke the spirit of “Western Africa”, and to spark reflection, with works ranging from the sunlight-filled canvas of young multicultural French artist Rachel Marsil, to the introspective and iconic creations of the late Senegalese painter Souleymane Keïta (1947-2014).

Other artists featured are Thibaud Bouedjoro-Camus, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Carl-Edouard Keïta, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, Vincent Michéa, Kassou Seydou and Ouattara Watts.

SWAN spoke with Càraboeuf about the exhibition and about the role of the Cecile Fakhoury galleries in highlighting contemporary African art globally. The edited interview, conducted in person in Paris, follows.

SWAN: Please tell us about the artists and paintings on display.

FRANCIS CORABOEUF: All of the artists represented by the gallery have something in common, which is Western Africa – as a geographical, human, cultural common ground. Many of the artists live in different places, or have a background that is diverse, so you have all the situations that you can imagine, and that reflects the complexity of today’s world. When you go to Abidjan, or to Dakar, those are cities that are cosmopolitan, with people coming from everywhere in the world, and they reflect colonial history and colonization, but also pre-colonial history and recent history, which is one of circulation, migration. 

The artist Rachel Marsil, for instance, was born in France, of a French mother and a father originally from Western Africa (she doesn’t know her father). But her work is a kind of identity research, and that is why she was attracted by Western Africa and why her work is oriented towards this region of the world. She and the gallery wanted to work together because those subjects of identity, history, geography, what are we doing here and where are we going - these are questions that the artists of the gallery are constantly raising.

SWAN: What else is notable about this exhibition? Can you expand on the focus?

FC: This is a group exhibition, and I wanted to present the work of different artists that have a presence right now in Paris, to create an echo, and also to gather some works that are all channelling an idea of warmth, of happiness, of positivity. It’s a response to this time of the year; it’s a response also to how can we create an echo to what’s happening in Dakar and in Abidjan and how do we take people from here and orient their gaze towards Western Africa. 

“Pays de Cocagne” refers to an imaginary land, which is a land filled with abundance and dreams, and it’s a utopic place. This is a more subtle approach to the evocation of Western Africa, which is often exoticized. At the gallery, when we present the works of the artists in France, we often confront the clichés that people have toward Westen African countries. So, there’s a kind of deconstruction.  

SWAN: How did you go about choosing the works?

FC: The idea was to create a group where the works would echo one another. The exhibition gathers work from very young artists (for example, Rachel Marsil is under 30) and also from artists such as Souleyman Keïta, who died in 2014 and is considered to be someone at the intersection between the modern art scene and the contemporary art scene. 

The title of his work here is “Voyage au Mali”, and I wanted to include this work because I thought it was important to show some works by Souleymane Keïta in Paris, as we’re in this process of reevaluating, revalorising his work - on conceptual, historical and art-market levels. This painting is interesting because it was created between 1980 and 1985, in New York where he was living at the time, and he was evoking his roots which are in Mali, although he was born on the island of Gorée (off the coast of Senegal).

SWAN: There is also another Keïta in the exhibition, Carl-Edouard Keïta, the Ivorian-born, New York-based artist who is influenced by Cubism and portrays a fantastical world in his art…?

FC: Yes, Carl-Edouard Keïta is represented in this exhibition, and he will also have his first solo show in Abidjan at the Cecile Fakhoury gallery there - titled Goumbé, from 13 February to 12 April. The works in that show draw inspiration from cultural associations that were founded by migrants of the Ivorian interior and other areas during the post-independence years. (More info about Goumbé: https://cecilefakhoury.com/exhibitions/117-goumbe-carl-edouard-keita-abidjan/overview/)

SWAN: What do you hope visitors will take away from “Pays de Cocagne”?

FC: It’s important for people to understand where these artists stand in the history of art. When I went to university and studied art history, what I studied didn’t give me the tools to understand how things are interconnected. So, this is what we do, or try to do as gallerists.

Pays de Cocagne runs until March 29 in Paris.

Photos (by AM/SWAN), from top: Paintings by Ouattara Watts and Rachel Marsil; Paris gallery director Francis Coraboeuf, with artwork by Rachel Marsil and Souleymane Keïta; artwork by Kassou Seydou; Voyage au Mali by Souleymane Keïta; Le dormeur du sable by Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, 2024 (below). 

FILM REVIEW: ‘PÉPÉ’ PORTRAYS A COLOMBIAN ‘OUTSIDER’

By Dimitri Keramitas

One of the strangest cases of invasive species appeared a number of years ago in Colombia. The notorious narco lord Pablo Escobar - a man worth billions - decided to create a private animal sanctuary and imported, among other fauna, a number of hippopotami. The sanctuary went to seed after Escobar was killed by law enforcement officers, but the hippos remained - and multiplied, disturbing the environment. 

Pépé, a film by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias - winner of the Golden Bear for Best Direction at 2024’s Berlinale - recounts the story of one such hippo as a surreal fable. The movie resembles certain films of Werner Herzog, with its combination of documentary footage and metaphysical fiction, but the director isn’t always in control of his form. Neither is he always in control of his metaphysics. 

The story of Pépé begins in Namibia, southern Africa. We follow a group of German tourists being bused into the wild to see the animals, led by a German (or perhaps Afrikaner) guide. There’s amusing satire in the discrepancy between the guide’s account of hippos’ ways and the “superstitions” of his African assistant.

The shots of the landscape are powerful, but even more so is the depiction of the hippopotamus. We all have a cartoon image of a goofy animal (like the TV images of a cartoon hippo the filmmaker sometimes shows us), as opposed to the rhino with the pointy horn and the elephant with his tusks. But the hippo is also an intimidating beast with a massive size and thick leathery hide. 

In fact, the hippo is one of the wild’s most dangerous animals when riled. It can charge at high speed, and though it likes to lounge in the water, it can also move there with great rapidity. We don’t see precisely how Pépé was captured, but there are darkly comical scenes of two flunkies transporting it through the Colombian hinterlands in a rickety truck (they don’t really know what their cargo is). The animal almost causes the truck to tumble over, but the men manage to bring it to its watery destination. 

The scenes of Pépé, first in Africa, then in Colombia, are strikingly vivid, and sometimes verge on a mystical vision of nature, the images saturated with colour.

The hippo seems like a waterlogged tree in the river, a living boulder on land. Its nature is utterly inscrutable, at least until it goes into action against anyone disturbing its space. An exception are the birds that hop onto its hide to peck at the insects which are an irritation for him but sustenance for them. 

The nature footage, whether of Pépé or the environment enveloping him, are the best parts of the film. The voice-over purporting to express the hippo’s thoughts seems, with a few exceptions, too philosophical and, especially, anthropocentric. It doesn’t help that sometimes the voice-over is in Spanish, sometimes in another language. The noises that the hippo makes on occasion (which appear to be the filmmaker’s invention) are more expressive of his elemental strangeness. 

For the viewer, the Colombian landscape seems just as “natural” as that of southern Africa, and even more tropical. However, they are of course not the same, and the difference acts upon the nature of the hippos. Animals that lived together in natural harmony begin to have conflicts, and after a falling-out with one dominant hippo, Pépé migrates to a different area. 

Pépé’s travels don’t always seem clear, although this may be meant to evoke the hippo’s furtive movement in the water, his muzzle barely above the surface. The specifics of migration can seem mysterious, and Pépé is kind of lost. That doesn’t make it easy for the viewer. The director compensates by showing images of maps on the screen, but they don’t clarify the hippo’s path, and the territories highlighted aren’t familiar. Worse, the maps seem jarringly artificial compared to the immediacy of the shots of Pépé. 

The film recalls Robert Bresson’s great work Au Hasard Balthazar, which was about an errant donkey. That particular animal was an obvious Christian symbol, accentuated by its encounters with a gallery of mostly negative characters and a tragic end. The human characters in Pépé are also mostly nasty or stupid, but the hippo’s own character isn’t pressed through an overtly Christian cookie-cutter. Pépé is an Other, whose strangeness is intended to be unknowable. In the film’s vision of naturalistic alienation we are all Others, subsumed to elemental violence, yet even on this level, the film could have done with more dramatization. 

It’s when Pépé approaches a remote river village that the film comes to life. Candelario (Jorge Puntillon Garcia), an elderly villager, encounters the hippo on the river, and this changes his life in a strange way. It results in a breakdown of relations with his wife (an irascible type to begin with). As other villagers experience close encounters with the hippo, they come into conflict with the Inspector in charge of local order. He rejects their repeated solicitations, which frays the social fabric. 

Some surreal touches take the film’s naturalism into odd directions. Candelario leaves behind his fellow villagers, and his wife, to row his boat in the vicinity of the hippo. He knows it’s dangerous, but something attracts him. A different attraction principle attaches to a beauty contest featuring young village women who give the judges accounts of their exalted ambitions (one wants to become a scientist, another a journalist). The contest culminates in the women floating down the river on gaudily flower-laden rafts. They aren’t harmed by the huge animal in the river, so there does seem to be something beyond “nature red in tooth and claw”. 

The initial footage of Pépé and the dramatic scenes are the most effective parts of the film. The arty bits - the recurrent motif of soldiers on an operation, TV cartoon shots, occasional screen black-outs, the voice-overs - drive home the fact that the director isn’t a conventional hack of a filmmaker. Arias, who’s from the Dominican Republic, has a background in experimental film and studied in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Edinburgh, and Los Angeles.  Still, these techniques are distractions, venal sins committed by a filmmaker who hasn’t fully digested his technique, or his content. 

That content includes social and political context. Arias’ treatment of Colombian reality can be seen as a series of deft touches: the absurdity of the men transporting Pépé, the village Inspector, the beauty contest. They bring to mind the Colombia of Garcia Marquez (the film as a whole is like a Marquezian fable). However, the civil war between the government and FARC guerrillas, the bloody reign of the narco lords, America’s DEA interventionism, seem to have been extracted from the film’s universe like a painful molar. Even the killing of Escobar is presented as something of a natural occurrence, devoid of context. 

Pépé is an ambitious Dominican-French-German-Namibian co-production. Likewise, no less than four actors of different nationalities took turns voicing the hippo’s thoughts. But while the film succeeds in attaining complexity, it’s at the expense of its Colombian core.

Despite its flaws, the brilliant sequences redeem Pépé as a film, however. And as a fable it powerfully depicts the consequences of the disturbances currently being visited upon nature. The creatures displaced by these disturbances can be as small as birds (carrying a virus) or as large as a hippo, but the ultimate blame doesn’t lie with them. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the invasive species, and he is us.”  

Pépé hits French theatre screens in January 2025. Photos courtesy of the film distributors.

JAMES BALDWIN FEST TO CELEBRATE WRITER, IN PARIS

For the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth, an international array of literature fans are coming together in Paris at a festival that will honour the life and work of the iconic American author and civil rights activist.

The James Baldwin Centennial Festival, scheduled for Sept. 9 to 13, aims to be a “celebration” that will take place at multiple venues in the French capital, according to Tara Phillips, executive director of La Maison Baldwin, the organizers.

The non-profit group (founded in 2016 in Saint Paul de Vence, where Baldwin spent the last 17 years of his life) essentially wishes to preserve and promote the writer’s legacy by “nurturing creativity, fostering intellectual exchange, and championing diverse voices through conferences and residencies,” according to its stated objectives.

In the eight years since it was formed, however, La Maison Baldwin hasn’t always had smooth sailing, as some of its activities ran counter to the vision of Baldwin’s family on how to honour his uncompromising work and long-lasting influence. But now, with new direction, the organization has the family’s support, including for the festival, Phillips says.

Baldwin - the author of stirring books such as The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room - remains one of the most revered (and quoted) writers today, decades after his death in 1987. Born on Aug. 2, 1924, he would have turned 100 this year, and the festival might have been held in his birth month were it not for the recent Paris Olympic Games.

According to Phillips, the event will comprise panel discussions, writing workshops, an art exhibition, student participation and an open-mic segment, among the various features.

In the following edited interview, conducted in person in Paris, Phillips discusses the overall goals and the far-reaching power of Baldwin’s works and words.

SWAN: Let’s start with the centenary and why this festival, why it’s taking place in France.

Tara Phillips: La Maison Baldwin was founded in the south of France, and it was intended to provide both writers’ residencies and writers’ conferences. Then the founder moved to Paris in 2022 and left the organization. So, the centennial seems like the perfect opportunity to reclaim the organization and reintroduce it on new footing. 

And so that’s why we thought it was important to do a centennial event, and we also wanted to be aligned with the family who had already been thinking about the centennial in early 2023. We were trying to build a relationship with them, and it just made sense that we were all thinking about this as a way to collectively honour his legacy.

(Note: Baldwin’s family held a centennial celebration at the Lincoln Center in New York on Aug. 7, at which Phillips spoke.)

SWAN: How will the family be involved in the Paris festival?

TP: Well, on the first day, there’s a welcoming reception, and I will invite Trevor Baldwin, James Baldwin’s nephew, to say a few words. But then on the following day, we’ll have the very first panel, called “La Maison Baldwin”, and it’s about the idea of home, both literally and also as in the Black literary tradition. Trevor will participate on that panel as somebody who knew his Uncle Jimmy, and can give some insight into the idea of home for James Baldwin. He was a Harlem man, but he lived all over the world, and his idea of home is pretty complex. And what I’m discovering as I get to know more and more members of the family is that a lot of them have this wanderlust and live in different parts of the world. So, that will be a way to engage a familial voice on that issue, particularly for Black people.

SWAN: Is the festival open to the general public?

TP: There’s a festival fee, but anybody can attend. James Baldwin’s followers and admirers are so diverse: you have the Black community, the literary community, the activist community, the LGBTQ+ community, you have students, academics, artists. The idea was to create an experience that would appeal to all those types of people, but always with the idea of centering James Baldwin.

SWAN: What are some of the other aspects of the event?

TP: We’ll have a welcome reception, and that’s going to be sponsored by the US Embassy. It will be just a moment to come together and celebrate the fact that we’re in Paris and to kick things off. Then we will start the next day with a keynote speaker (author Robert Jones, Jr.) and multiple panel discussions where we’ll be thinking about Baldwin and reflecting on the theme of the festival: Baldwin and Black Legacy, Truth, Liberation, Activism.

SWAN: How did the theme come about?

TP: It came about as the centennial committee brainstormed words that came to mind when we thought about Baldwin and his work and his impact. You know, he spoke truth, also in his writing. And for many people, it liberated them. He gave us the language to liberate us from conceptions of ourselves, or our perceptions of the world, and perceptions of our humanity. And that liberation motivates activism for many of us. That’s how we came to that theme.

SWAN: And continuing with the various elements of the festival, there will be an art exhibition?

TP: Yes, we’ll have an exhibition that will be running during the week. It's called Frontline Prophet. Those works are by Sabrina Nelson, curated by Ashara Ekundayo and Omo Misha. It’s this brilliant collection of art sketches that Sabrina initially did in 2016 at the James Baldwin conference (held at the American University of Paris), and it’s returning, coming full circle.

SWAN: The festival will also have writing workshops (for an additional fee). Please tell us about those.

TP: We will have a fiction track and a creative nonfiction track. These are separate as not all festival participants will be joining. 

But if you’re a writer and you want to have a curated experience with some successful writers, we have Deesha Philyaw (author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) doing the fiction workshop, and Brian Broome (author of the memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods) is doing the creative nonfiction. And that will be happening for folks who want to have that experience.

SWAN: In addition, there’s a big move to engage students, youth…

TP: Yes, there will be a student activism workshop. We want to engage young people with Baldwin’s work and tap into their own sense of activism. You know, these are such interesting times to be young, right? There have always been things happening in history, in our world, but because of social media, because we have access to see everything all the time, I think young people are engaged in a a very different way than they probably would have been without these mediums. And they’ve been the ones to kind of reinvigorate Baldwin’s language and works in a lot of ways.

So, we wanted to give them a space where they could explore the idea of activism through leadership, through creativity and through community. For those three days, they will have their own space together to look at some of Baldwin’s works, to engage with each other and talk with each other. We’re partnering with the Collectif Baldwin (a local organization) on that. I actually think this is the most important part of the festival.

SWAN: Where will the students be coming from?

TP: We basically would like to see students from everywhere who have the time or interest to attend. But we also think it’s very important that there’s a presence of French students as well because what I’m discovering, particularly as a I make more connections here in Paris, is that there is so much to be learned from Baldwin in the context of France and their relations around racism and cultural identity. So, to be able to engage French students in this conversation would be to discuss their own activism. After the workshop, they will also do a presentation - on what they learned and on how they can take Baldwin into the future.

SWAN: Let’s talk about your background coming into this. What is your personal relationship with Baldwin’s work?

TP: It’s interesting because I don’t remember the first time I ever really read James Baldwin. I know I don’t remember reading him when I was in high school - I remember reading Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry. But I was in high school in the Eighties before there really was an infusion of black literature, so it was hard to come by. 

Then, I ended up reading The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which was interesting to read because it wasn’t the ones he’s known for. It was about the Atlanta Child Murders, which were happening around the same time that I was a kid. There’s something about being immersed in that specific topic and getting it from his perspective that was really interesting for me.

Then he would pop up in my psyche over the years, and now he kind of haunts me because I’m constantly doing this work. And the connection for me, with respect to taking on this work, is that I have moved to Paris as a Black American (in 2018), and I started writing then, and I could just really connect to his sense of freedom coming here. I mean, being in the United States as a Black American and then also as the mother of a Black son, there’s just a weight that you carry, and people who don’t have our experience, they don’t understand what it’s like, and they don’t understand how persistent it is: how you can try to live a life of joy, and of peace, and of intellectual curiosity and all of these things as a Black American, but there’s always a moment when you’re kind of smacked back to the reality of, like, our positioning in society and our history. His words became so important to me, especially after George Floyd’s murder. Baldwin just understood. He had the language.

Another connection for me, and I’ve written about this, is that my father’s name is James and my father was born in Harlem and grew up there, like Baldwin. Turns out that they both went to the same high school but 20 years apart. I think about my dad’s connection to Harlem, his Harlem pride, and how he left because things got so bad in the Sixties and Seventies. He moved my whole family out because he wanted something better for us. And in some ways, I feel that that was James Baldwin’s understanding: another black Jimmy from Harlem saying: “I’ve got to get out of here if I’m going to be true to my own humanity and live the life that I need to live.”

SWAN: In light of all this, what are your hopes for the festival overall?

TP: My hopes for the festival are that it’s really seen and viewed as a celebration of James Baldwin. That’s why I’ve been really keen on calling it a “festival” and not a “conference” because a conference tends to suggest an academic event, with people sitting and providing an analysis of his work, and what I’m hoping is: let’s just celebrate Uncle Jimmy and what he has given us.

Let it just be a party of writers and artists and creatives and scholars, just experiencing one another and Paris, and why this place was important for him and his own experience and development as a human. And let’s just celebrate young people, and their potential and their possibilities, which I think Baldwin really cared about. He had a word for everybody, you know. And it’s funny because Duke University Press has donated 300 copies of Little Man, Little Man, which Baldwin wrote for his nephew, and I love that this is a children’s book… this is what it’s really about - passing on the word for another generation. - AM / SWAN

Photos (top to bottom): A 2016 sketch of James Baldwin by artist Sabrina Nelson; Tara Phillips in Paris (photo by AM/SWAN); the cover of an early edition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (Dell Publishing); Deesha Philyaw (photo courtesy of the festival); the cover of The Evidence of Things Not Seen (Macmillan Publishers); the cover of Little Man, Little Man (Duke University Press).

For more info: https://www.lamaisonbaldwin.org/centennial

AT PARIS OLYMPICS, ART RUNS IN TANDEM WITH SPORTS

As cheers from beach-volleyball fans fill the air at the Eiffel Tower Stadium on a steamy, sunny day, pedestrians just down the road are enjoying another kind of show: an outdoor exhibition of huge photographs gleaming on the metal railings of UNESCO headquarters.

Titled Cultures at the Games, the exhibition is among hundreds of artistic and cultural events taking place across France during the 2024 Olympic Games (hosted by the French capital July 26 to Aug. 11), and they’re being staged alongside the numerous athletic contests.

The events even have an umbrella name – the Cultural Olympiad – and include photography, painting, sculpture, fashion, and a host of attractions linking art and sport. Most are scheduled to run beyond the closing ceremony of the Games.

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a “partner” in the Cultural Olympiad, arranging not only the usual meetings where bureaucrats give lofty speeches, but also showcasing a series of works to highlight diversity and inclusion.

Cultures at the Games, for instance, comprises some 140 photographs portraying memorable aspects of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics since 1924 and is presented in association with the Olympic Museum of Lausanne.

Images show how national delegations have transmitted their culture during these extravaganzas, and the pictures depict athletes such as Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, whose “lightning bolt” pose has become part of the Games’ folklore even as he has helped to make the green, gold and black colours of his country’s flag more recognizable.

Inside UNESCO’s Y-shaped building, meanwhile, a collection of panels focuses on how sport can “Change the Game”, a theme running across all of the organization’s “Olympiad” events. (At the “World Ministerial Meeting” that UNESCO hosted on July 24, just ahead of the Olympics, officials discussed gender equality, inclusion of people with disabilities, and protection of athletes, for example.)

A notable section of the indoor exhibition features historic photographs that pay tribute to athletes who sparked change through their achievements or activism. Here, one can view an iconic picture of American athlete Jesse Owens, the “spanner in the works that completely disrupted the Nazi propaganda machine set up during the 1936 Berlin Olympics,” according to the curators.

Owens won four medals at the Games, but “received no immediate (official) recognition from his own country” despite being welcomed as a hero by the public, as the exhibition notes. The racism in the United States meant that President Franklyn D. Roosevelt refused to congratulate him “for fear of losing votes in the Southern states.” The photo shows him standing on the podium in Berlin, while behind him another competitor gives a “Hitler salute”.

Athletes who changed the world equally features boxer Mohammad Ali, who in 1967 refused to fight in Vietnam and was stripped of his world championship title and banned from the ring for three years.

Perhaps the most famous image, however, is that of athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 games in Mexico City. They “removed their shoes and walked forward in socks to protest against the extreme poverty faced by African Americans,” as the caption reminds viewers. “With solemn faces, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and raised their gloved black fists, aiming to raise global awareness about racial segregation in their country.”

The exhibition outlines the long battles faced by women athletes as well, and it highlights the work of Alice Milliat who, as president of the French Women’s Sports Federation, “campaigned for women’s inclusion in Olympic sports”. She organized the first Women’s Olympic Games in Paris in 1922, bringing together five countries and 77 athletes.

Although Milliat “died in obscurity” in 1957, her “legacy endures today, with the Paris 2024 Games highlighting gender equality in sports, largely thanks to her visionary efforts,” says the photo caption.

Similarly, the exhibition spotlights the contributions of disabled athletes such as Ryadh Sallem, who was born without arms or legs, a victim of the Thalidomide medication that was prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s and Sixties and caused deformities in children.

Sallem won 15 French championship titles in swimming and later turned to team sports such as wheelchair basketball and rugby. At UNESCO, his photograph is prominently displayed, along with the story of his hopes for the 2024 Paralympics and his mission to “promote a positive vision of disability”.

Elsewhere in the city, artists and museums are also paying tribute to Paralympic competitors, ahead of the Paralympic Games from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8 in Paris.

On the fencing around the imposing Gare de l’Est (train station), colourful works by artist Lorenzo Mattotti show disabled athletes competing in a variety of sports, while the Panthéon is presenting the “Paralympic Stories: From Sporting Integration to Social Inclusion (1948-2024)”. This exposition relates the “history of Paralympism and the challenges of equality,” according to curators Anne Marcellini and Sylvain Ferez.

For fans of sculpture, Paris has a range of “Olympiad” works on view for free. In June, the city unveiled its official “sculpture olympique” or Olympic Statue, created by Los Angeles-based African-American artist Alison Saar, who cites inspiration from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

The sculpture, located near the famed Champs Elysées avenue, depicts a seated African woman holding a flame in front of the Olympic rings, and it “embodies Olympic values of inclusivity and peace,” according to the office of Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo.

When it was inaugurated on June 23, however, it sparked a flurry of hostile remarks from some far-right commentators on social media, who apparently felt threatened by the work.

Another statue of a woman, that of Venus de Milo or the mythical goddess Aphrodite, has been “reinterpreted” in six versions by artistic director Laurent Perbos to symbolise “feminine” sporting disciplines, including boxing, archery and surfing. The statues stand in front of the National Assembly, and the irony won’t be lost on most viewers: French women secured the right to vote only in 1944.

Of course, Paris wouldn’t be Paris without another particular artform. As the much-discussed Opening Ceremony of the Olympics showed, fashion is an integral part of these Games, and those who didn’t get enough of the array of sometimes questionable costumes can head for another dose with “La Mode en movement #2” (Fashion in Motion #2).

This exhibition at the Palais Galliera / Fashion Museum looks at the history of sports clothing from the 18^th century, with a special focus on beachwear. Among the 250 pieces on display, viewers will surely gain tips on what to wear for beach volleyball.

Photos (top to bottom): cover of the Cultural Olympiad programme; a photo of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics, in Athletes who changed the world at UNESCO; an image of Tommie Smith in the same exhibition; artwork by Lorenzo Mattoti at Gare de l'Est, photo by AM/SWAN; artist Alison Saar with her Olympic Sculpture, photo courtesy of the City of Paris.

For more information, see: Olympiade Culturelle (paris2024.org)