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, 2018 © Minia Biabiany. Photo © Jeanchristophe Lett / Manifesta 13 Marseille.
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.