Amélie Agbo
Vénus / Saartjie Baartman et ses organes - Installation - 2021
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 23
Installation
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.” (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 1970, p. 205.)
Amélie Agbo
My practice combines animation and video games. I appropriate their stereotyped images of blacks in French society. In 2010 I obtained a professional baccalaureate, in artisanship and artistic crafts. Returning to France after a six-month study trip to Ogaki Women’s College in the Gifu region of Japan, I decided to spend a year preparing for art school entrance exams. In 2014 I was awarded a place at the École Èuropéenne Supérieure de l’Image in Poitiers. On obtaining my degree (DNAP) in 2017, I spent four months at the Beijing Film Academy, in the “animation art” section. En 2018 I wrote C, my degree thesis on the deprecation of black women’s bodies. In 2019 I entered Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, where I made the short animation film BéninCity : Épisode 4.
