![\"Caroline-Deodat\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_DO_Bergs_Caroline-Deodat_01.jpg\")
Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em>, video still, 2023.
\u00a9 Caroline D\u00e9odat \/ ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa (2024)
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
But although D\u00e9odat\u2019s artistic practice is clearly informed by her work as an anthropologist, it is also markedly different. Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches <\/em>is a poetic proposition more than a video essay; insisting on the right to opacity and maintaining a degree of indeterminacy, it is expressly non-didactic. This is not to say that the proposition is somehow not articulate or sharp. Where the work is incisive\u200a\u2014\u200awhere it really cuts<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ais on the level of form, and particularly in its treatment of the moving image, which is theoretical in the precise etymological sense of engendering a thick and complex kind of seeing that is in itself already a kind of contemplation. By thinking both about and with Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em>, I seek to demonstrate how the work raises issues concerning hauntology, memory, and fetishization, hence stressing certain continuities between contemporary tourism and the colonial past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a shot of a shoreline in Mauritius, the second section of Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em> presents a Sega performance of an entirely different kind, now heightened by sound and music. Here, the set-up is markedly different. The performance is not, strictly speaking, a performance but an improvised get-together, a jam session, a celebration. No real distinction is made between audience and interpreters. It is late afternoon or early evening and the sun is low; the backlit shots reveal little more than the contours of the musicians and the single visible dancer. Rather abruptly, the editing cuts to scenes and sounds of the ocean and to an unidentified building in ruins. The images become increasingly blurry, until they are completely illegible, abstract, and uncanny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This part of D\u00e9odat\u2019s work is bookended by brief bits of text\u200a\u2014\u200ashown in white type against a black background\u200a\u2014\u200aabout an unnamed female protagonist, written in the third person singular, that raise issues of trauma and memory. As such, these moments in Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches <\/em>intimate one of the things that, for D\u00e9odat, are crucially at stake in the practice of Sega. The end of the section clearly reflects her interest in hauntology\u200a\u2014\u200aand perhaps specifically what Viviane Saleh-Hanna, citing Toni Morrison, calls black feminist \u201crememory\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200ain that it imparts a sense of the Mauritian landscape pervaded and troubled by the spectres of colonial pasts.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Viviane Saleh-Hanna, \u201cBlack Feminist Hauntology: Rememory the Ghosts of Abolition?,\u201d Champ p\u00e9nal\u200a\u2014\u200aPenal Field <\/em>12 (2015), accessible online.<\/span> These shots, one could say, are working to make felt that which many casual visitors to the island fail (or prefer not) to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as importantly, however, the scene here is set for a confrontation between different kinds of (counter-)memory, which will be addressed and formally synthesized\u200a\u2014\u200athough not resolved\u200a\u2014\u200ain the crucial final part of Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches. <\/em>Implicitly, but forcefully, two conflicting yet intertwined manners of memorializing meet here: the somatic and embodied memory of the Sega musicians and dancers, and the \u201cofficial\u201d memories represented in the colonial archive, typically through such apparently stable and secure media as writing, photography, and indeed film. The former, importantly, is neither innocent nor pure: it carries within itself traces of the conditioning and informing of the genre of Sega by colonialism (it is mainly tourist attractions and spectacles directed to the gaze of outsiders that claim authenticity), but it is also in excess of this conditioning and informing, enacting what Fred Moten calls the \u201cresistance of the object.\u201d As Moten writes: \u201cThe history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition <\/em>(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003), 1.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In the lengthy closing scene of D\u00e9odat\u2019s work, which takes up about half of the video\u2019s duration, black and white archival footage of people dancing Sega is first projected onto the distinctive white skirts worn by Sega dancers. Subsequently, the same footage is projected at night, in an outdoor setting, onto a sheet stretched over a large wooden frame. With the aid of a torch or a burning branch, this makeshift screen is set ablaze and soon is consumed entirely by the flames. The projection itself does not stop, however, and when nothing remains of the screen but its smouldering remnants scattered on the soil, a ghost-like interplay of light and shadow begins. The images of the dancers are now cast onto the smoke that rises from the ashes of what used to be the screen. The movement in and of the images mingles with that of the smoke clouds drifting upwards, until finally only darkness remains and there is nothing left to be seen, only the light of the projector flickering at some distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The footage used by D\u00e9odat is a short excerpt from Louise Weiss\u2019s 1963 film \u00d4 pauvre Virginie<\/em>. The scene can be seen as exemplary of the kind of images produced for and contained in the colonial audiovisual archive. Essentially a typical\u200a\u2014\u200aand problematic\u200a\u2014\u200apiece of ethnographic filmmaking that uses the visual technology of cinema to both encapsulate and incite a fascinated yet deeply othering spectatorial gaze, \u00d4 pauvre Virginie <\/em>sits uneasily, to say the least, with Weiss\u2019s canonization as a proponent of \u201cEuropean values\u201d (she played an active role in the development of the EU) or as a feminist icon. As Fatimah Tobing Rony writes in her now-classic critique of such ethnographic films, pieces like \u00d4 pauvre Virginie <\/em>suggest a racializing \u201cnarrative of evolution\u201d by \u201cjuxtaposing the white tourist with the peoples filmed: the Native versus the Civilized, the Ethnographic versus the Historical, the Colonized versus the Colonialist.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 83.<\/span> Unsurprisingly, given her work in anthropology, the history and reception of ethnographic film is a recurrent concern for D\u00e9odat, who describes addressing, critiquing, and looking anew at imagery from the colonial archive as one of her main objectives as an artist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, she brings the images from \u00d4 pauvre Virginie <\/em>into constellation with images shot in a present-day tourist resort to stress the continuity between contemporary tourism and the histories of colonial \u201ctravel.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n As her work demonstrates quite clearly, the uneven scopic relations\u200a\u2014\u200athemselves revealing of persistent relations of power\u200a\u2014\u200aremain identical, whether in Weiss\u2019s film or in contemporary tourist spectacles. In both instances, it remains quite clear who does the observing and who is observed, who does the fetishizing and who is fetishized. The positive reception and cultural recognition of Sega, in and of itself, does little to change this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The gesture of setting fire to the images from Weiss\u2019s film needs to be seen in relation to this. It is a gesture heavy with symbolism, and speaks to the desire finally to be done with the imagery of the colonial archive and the forms of memorializing that it imposes. At the same time, however, the fantasy of such a tabula rasa is also immediately dispelled; after all it is really only the support that is destroyed, not the images (or the memories) themselves. The latter persist, albeit in a hauntological mode, as ghostly presences. Finally, it is important to note that D\u00e9odat\u2019s iconoclasm is aimed not only at particular pictures\u200a\u2014\u200asuch as the Louise Weiss film, or similar products of the ethnographic imagination\u200a\u2014\u200abut also at the cinematic apparatus more generally. The projection screen that is set aflame here serves as an allegorical stand-in for this apparatus, and as such asks some difficult questions concerning the politics of representation and recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The finale scene in Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em>, then, is complex and ambivalent, and this it has in common with the notion of the fetish, which is referred to in the work\u2019s title, but is never explicitly mentioned in the video. A product of the colonial encounter between European \u201ctravellers\u201d and West African cultures in the fifteenth century and etymologically derived from the Portuguese feiti\u00e7o <\/em>and the Pidgin word fetisso <\/em>(both roughly meaning \u201cmade\u201d), it is a term variously used to describe religious practices (in anthropology), to designate forms of sexual \u201cdeviance\u201d (in psychiatry and psychoanalysis), and to critique the false consciousness that is both materially encapsulated in and projected upon the commodity (in Marxism), among other things. A product of intercultural\u200a\u2014\u200aimpure and promiscuous\u200a\u2014\u200aorigins, the word itself already presents \u201can embarrassment\u201d to those who try to control its meaning, as William Pietz notes in his influential commentary.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - William Pietz, \u201cThe Problem of the Fetish, I,\u201d RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics <\/em>9 (Spring 1985): 5.<\/span> David Graeber has noted that the fetish, for Pietz, is \u201cborn in a field of endless improvisation, that is, of near pure social creativity.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>[REf count=6]David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire <\/em>(Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 117.[\/REF] In this sense, it remains potent, even if uses of the term obviously are testament to a long history of prejudice and misapprehension. D\u00e9odat\u2019s work, rather than attempting to pin down and delimit the notion of the fetish, hones in on\u200a\u2014\u200aand further explodes\u200a\u2014\u200athe term\u2019s polysemic qualities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n For example, the images projected on the rising smoke clouds are reminiscent of the phantasmagoria, a kind of magic lantern show often mentioned as a precursor to the cinema. The phantasmagoria, importantly, is also a crucial point of reference for both hauntology and Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism. The final scene in Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em>, then, is not only heavily symbolical (setting fire to images from the colonial archive, only to reveal their ghostly lingering) and affectively arresting (there is a real mesmerizing beauty in the shot); it also alludes to histories of critical thought concerned with what is seen and unseen, material and immaterial, real and unreal. This, in turn, links back to the notion of the fetish: the one aspect that different uses of the notion of fetishism have in common is the trope of certain transcendental or supernatural qualities or powers being ascribed to or projected upon material objects or manifestations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, like fetishism itself, Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches <\/em>is concerned with troubling and shading these oppositions and distinctions, with holding them in suspension. The ending, then, poignant as it may be, offers no resolution but is really all about underscoring ongoingness\u200a\u2014\u200athe ongoingness of colonial practices in present-day tourism, for instance, but also the ongoingness of resistance or of what gets called (belatedly, and with imprecision) \u201ctradition.\u201d This can be heard, too, in the music that accompanies and carries away these final few moments of the video. As for this music, suffice it to say and desire that its vibrancy and effervescence might serve as a reminder that what can be made can also be unmade\u200a\u2014\u200ain impromptu, improvisational, and improper communion, under the open skies of night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Art historian and critic Steyn Bergs is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the aesthetics of infrastructure in contemporary art, as well as on artistic practices that address uneven development and trouble linear conceptions of timeGhosts<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Caroline-Deodat\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_DO_Bergs_Caroline-Deodat_23_6432_1.jpg\")
Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em>, video still, 2023.
\u00a9 Caroline D\u00e9odat \/ ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa (2024)
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe Fire, the Fetish<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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![\"Caroline-Deodat\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/111_DO_Bergs_Caroline-Deodat_Still044.jpg\")
Sous le ciel des f\u00e9tiches<\/em>, video still, 2023.
\u00a9 Caroline D\u00e9odat \/ ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa (2024)
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
and history.<\/p>\n\n\n