Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.

Minia Biabiany, GP

Toli Toli uses the spacial metaphor of an old children’s song to convey an intertwined political narrative about Guadeloupe. In the videopoem, the ‘toli toli’ – a butterfly’s chrysalid in Guadeloupean créole – points toward an inner elsewhere, toward places and distances shaped by coloniality. The moving chrysalid, the ‘toli toli’, shows an inside – a place once marked as ‘here’ by an old silence, but which now enunciates the history of the territory and denunciates strategies of assimilation. In the course of the story about a landscape where shadows possess the ‘power of naming’, two hands seem to repeatedly weave an invisible object. This visually absent figure is a bamboo weaving used in fish traps, which the artist chose as a metaphor of narration and the structure of language.