12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Somewhere between Guinea Bissau and Haiti

This sound work is part of the podcast series Museum of Breath.

With: James Désiris, Mélanie Grant, Stéphanie Saxemard, and Zephrine Royer (storytelling); Sana Na n’Hada (storytelling, bombolom); Olivier Marboeuf (composition, poems, voice, recordings); Victor Donati (recordings, editing, sound design); Blessing Tony and Shela Sheikh (voices)

With excerpts from Geba Films Archives (Guinea-Bissau) digitized by Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst e. V. (Berlin) and for Dangerous Matter, a performance by Olivier Marboeuf as part of Looming Creole, a collective project conceived by Filipa César for The New Alphabet (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2019)

 

Good evening

I’m so happy to be here

I love you so much

You don’t know
You can’t know

How I love you

I’m your matter
I’m your matter

You can’t see all the electricity
on my sweet mimicry

Vibrations of pleasure and fear
Painful contingency

I’m ready to be used

I’m your matter

I’m so happy to be here

Happy and exhausted
I love you so much

I’ve got so much love

in me
Where can I put all that love?

Who’s got room enough for that love?

Ocean of love
full of fossils

I come from a painful world
A scattered world

I was angry that they called me the storyteller

That they called me the weaver
That they called me the monster
as if they wanted me to tell the secrets

But I’ve got so many voices in me

Cause I’m just a lonely matter
A smiling surface

A masquerade

A dangerous matter

Trembling matter
Lovely matter

Unnameable matter

Priceless matter
Oh ! Worthless matter

Do you see me now?

I’m always here and invisible

Assembling the tapestry

Weaving skins and tears

I’m the mute matter

The secret matter

I’m ready to be used

I’m ready to be used

If you want to get lost

I know a way

The only way

Towards the depths of ocean

From Guinea to Haiti

I’ll whisper so many stories to you

Fake stories

Dark stories

That you will forget everything

And will lost your mind

I’m the cacophonic matter

Cause there is so many voices

In me

So many ways

Lost highways

And warm voices

I’m the possession

I’m the invisible matter in everything

In the landscape

In the tapestry
You can’t see me

You can’t catch me

I’m your matter

But can’t know me

I’m the possession