Events

FRIDAY APRIL 20, 6-9pm
Opening with a per­for­mance by the artist Otobong Nkanga.

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WEDNESDAY MAY 2 AND JUNE 2, AND SATURDAY JULY 7, 3.30pm
Tour of the Garden of Tropical Agronomy led by Serge Volper, archivist at the Historical Library of the Cirad (Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development).

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SATURDAY JULY 7, 1.30pm
Picnic with a com­men­tary by Serge Volper.
CANCELLATION
Due to an instable whether, we must cancel the picnic. Please come to see the exhi­bi­tion instead. Specific visits will be pro­grammed.

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FRIDAY JUNE 29, 7pm
Talk around the issues related to the pro­ject Tropicomania and to La Triennale by Françoise Vergès, sci­en­tific curator of the exhi­bi­tion

Françoise Vergès is Consulting Professor at Goldsmiths College, London and President of the Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. She receives pro­posals to col­lab­o­rate with artists - Isaac Julien, Caecilia Tripp, Sylvie Blocher, Yinka Shonibare... -, and with numerous art pro­jects and exhi­bi­tions (recently, One cap­tion hides another at Bétonsalon). She is the author of Maryse Condé’s 2011 por­trait for the col­lec­tion Empreintes. She is preparing, in the frame­work of La Triennale, guided tours at Le Louvre with invited artists and authors on the sub­ject of « The Slave in the Louvre ». Françoise Vergès pub­lishes in French and English on slavery and its her­itage today, abo­li­tionist doc­trines, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and the « post­colo­nial » museum.

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Saturday talks at Bétonsalon, 3pm

SATURDAY APRIL 21, 3pm
Talk by the artist Maria Thereza Alves

Maria Thereza Alves was born in Brazil in 1961; she lives and works in Europe. Her research focuses on social and cul­tural phe­nomena, working par­tic­u­larly with sit­u­a­tions which ques­tion social cir­cum­stances about what we think we know and who we think we are; she explores instead where and how we actu­ally are at this time. Alves has exhib­ited her work at (selec­tion): the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Lyon Biennale, the Kunsthalle in Basel, Manifesta in Trento, the Guangzhou Triennale, the Prague Triennale, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Fondazione Sandretto in Turin, the Berlin Film Festival, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Liverpool Biennale. Her upcoming pro­jects include Documenta 13 in Kassel and a ret­ro­spec­tive at the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne, Nantes.

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SATURDAY APRIL 28, 3pm
Tour of the exhi­bi­tion by Serge Volper, sci­en­tific curator

Serge Volper is an agronomist and archivist at the Cirad his­tor­ical library, Nogent-sur-Marne. He has researched a number of food crops including rice and has worked in coun­tries such as Mali, Togo, Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, Rwanda and Madagascar. He recently pub­lished From cocoa vanilla - A his­tory of colo­nial plants, Quae, 2011.

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SATURDAY MAY 5, 3pm
Talk by eth­nol­o­gist Pascal Dibie on the domes­ti­ca­tion of plants.

Pascal Dibie is a writer, eth­nol­o­gist and teacher-researcher at Paris Diderot University.

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SATURDAY MAY 12, 3pm
Talk by anthro­pol­o­gist Maya Leclercq on the his­tory of rooibos, between mer­chants and her­itage issues

Maya Leclercq holds a PhD in social anthro­pology and works for the asso­cia­tive con­sulting firm AnthropoLinks, which she co-founded.

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SATURDAY MAY 19, 3pm
Talk by Serge Volper, sci­en­tific curator of the exhi­bi­tion, on the intro­duc­tion and cul­ti­va­tion of trop­ical plants

Serge Volper is an agronomist and archivist at the Cirad his­tor­ical library, Nogent-sur-Marne. He has researched a number of food crops including rice and has worked in coun­tries such as Mali, Togo, Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, Rwanda and Madagascar. He recently pub­lished From cocoa vanilla - A his­tory of colo­nial plants, Quae, 2011.

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SATURDAY MAY 26, 3pm
Talk by Isabelle Barbéris on floral scenog­raphy in the arts

Isabelle Barberis is a teacher-researcher at Paris Diderot University in Humanities and Arts.

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SATURDAY JUNE 9, 3pm
Talk by the artist Yo-Yo Gonthier on his pro­ject OUTRE-MER (2003-2012)

Yo-Yo Gonthier is born in Niamey, Niger, in 1974. He grad­u­ated with a Masters in Photography and Multimedia from Paris VIII University in 1997 and has since been working as a free­lance pho­tog­ra­pher, pri­marily based in Paris. The object of his work is the era­sure of memory in a western world where the essen­tial values seem to be speed, pro­gress and tech­nology. He seeks the sense of wonder, in a ten­sion between attrac­tion and repul­sion, bringing his own inter­pre­ta­tion to night-time pho­tog­raphy and the use of light and dark/chiaroscuro. He is also inter­ested in the rem­nants of France’s colo­nial past, inves­ti­gating the fric­tion between his­tory and memory in the Outre-Mer pro­ject, nom­i­nated for the Prix kodak de la cri­tique in 2005. He com­pleted a com­mis­sion for the Parc de la Villette, Paris for the 2009 Kréyol Factory exhi­bi­tion. He par­tic­i­pated in the Biennial of African Photography in Bamako, Mali, in 2005 and 2009 and in 2010, he is invited too coor­di­nate a pro­ject mixing pho­tog­raphy, sound and music ,for the first edi­tion of the Addis Foto Fest, in Ethiopia. He is cur­rently in res­i­dence with the City of Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis, France, until june 2013.

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SATURDAY JUNE 16, 3pm
Talk by Chantal Liaroutzos on agri­cul­tural trea­tises and trav­el­ogues of the 16th and 17th cen­turies

Chantal Liaroutzos is a lec­turer in Humanities at the University Paris Diderot.

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SATURDAY JUNE 23, 3pm
Talk by Ségolène Lavaud and Crystel Pinçonnat on the sig­nif­i­cance of nature in Haitian lit­er­a­ture and paint­ings

After a life spent working in fashion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and punc­tu­ated by numerous trips to Haiti, Ségolène Lavaud took up studies in 2000 at Paris Diderot University. In 2005, she com­pleted her Master thesis under the direc­tion of Crystel Pinçonnat on "Jacques Roumain - Jacques Stephen Alexis - The mar­vel­lous realism of two Haitian writers meta­mor­phosed by painters, ’boss metal’ and sculp­tors". Since com­pleting her PhD in 2011, she has been an auditor and a par­tic­i­pant to the NGO ’Haïti Futur’.

Crystel Pinçonnat, lec­turer in com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture at Denis Diderot University of Paris, pub­lished "New York, mythe lit­téraire français" (Droz, 2001). Her recent works focuses on « minority » lit­er­a­ture (afro-amer­ican, amerindian, and chi­cana). She will pub­lish a book on nar­ra­tions pro­duced by heirs of Algerian immi­gra­tion in France and Mexican in United States.

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SATURDAY JUNE 30, 3pm
Talk by the artist Marie Preston and Evelyne Cohen, from depart­ment of pho­to­graphic archives at Ministry of Culture and Communication

Marie Preston is born in 1980; she lives and works in Paris. She is a grad­uate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts of Paris and holds a PhD in Visual Arts and Art Sciences. She teaches pho­tog­raphy and video at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Through her artistic work, she develops col­lab­o­ra­tions based on encoun­ters including activ­i­ties in specific ter­ri­to­ries: knit­ting with the Association des Femmes Maliennes de Montreuil, trips on foot between Saint-Denis and Paris, doc­u­men­tary work on a ritual prac­tice in India and shared gar­dens in Paris. For Tropicomania, Marie Preston has under­taken two par­allel actions: a work­shop in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Paris Diderot (to which Evelyne Cohen has par­tic­i­pated [1]) in which a film about the Garden of Tropical Agronomy has been pro­duced, and a work with du Breuil hor­ti­cul­tural school. She is a member of the col­lec­tive RADO.

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SATURDAY JULY 21, 3pm
Talk by Jonathan Chauveau : Ananas Obsession

Pineapple is for the modern world what apple was in the Christian West: an archetypal fruit symbol. This theory is the origin of a research led by Jonathan Chauveau for sev­eral months. At Bétonsalon - Centre of art and research, he will talk about the pro­gress of his inves­ti­ga­tion about “the cul­tural pineapple”. He will speak about some artists like Cyril Aboucaya, Luis Buñel, Amos Gitaï, Camille Henrot or Bruno Peinado.

Jonathan Chauveau (born in 1978) is a con­trib­utor of the con­tem­po­rary art magazine FROG. He is also curator and jour­nalist.

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Study days

SATURDAY JUNE 2, 11am-7pm at the Jacques Kerchache Reading Room, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
The agri­cul­tural the­atre: ver­nac­ular knowl­edge, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and green impe­ri­alism

Download the full pro­gram (only in French):

The agri­cul­tural the­atre: ver­nac­ular knowl­edge, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and green impe­ri­alism The agri­cul­tural the­atre: ver­nac­ular knowl­edge, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and green impe­ri­alism is a study day ded­i­cated to exploring the polit­ical, socio-eco­nomic, legal and eco­log­ical stakes of the pro­duc­tion, trans­for­ma­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of agri­cul­ture, his­tor­i­cally and today. Anthropologists, his­to­rians, the­o­reti­ciens and pro­fes­sionals of food com­merce and dis­tri­bu­tion have been brought together to address themes ranging from the intel­lec­tual prop­erty of local knowl­edge, to the stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of agri­cul­tural pro­duces, and to ques­tion the nuances and con­tra­dic­tions inherent in the idea of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. The agri­cul­tural the­atre puts into per­spec­tive sub­jects located at the heart of the spec­u­la­tive and legal bat­tles between multi­na­tionals, agrarian pol­i­tics and land workers, and inter­ro­gates, through the expe­ri­ence and research of the par­tic­i­pants, the pre­sent and the pos­sible futures of agri­cul­ture under the sign of bio­di­ver­sity and social jus­tice.

Contributors:
Benoit Daviron, researcher in research eco­nomics and man­age­ment at Cirad, ‘envi­ron­ments and soci­eties’ depart­ment
Max-Henri Léon, pro­ject man­ager working in food dis­tri­bu­tion
Birgit Müller, research fellow at the Laboratoire d’anthro­pologie des insti­tu­tions et des organ­i­sa­tions sociales, EHESS
Marie Phliponeau, asso­ciate researcher at Laboratoire Erasme de l’Institut Maghreb-Europe, Paris 8 University
Jean-Claude Rabeherifara, soci­ol­o­gist and Adjunct Director of CILDA, Centre inter­na­tional des indus­tries de la langue et du développe­ment - Afrique-Amériques-Asie - Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense
Frédéric Thomas, research fellow at IRD, Institute of research for devel­op­ment), his­to­rian of sciences and engi­neering, and geog­ra­pher
Françoise Vergès, polit­ical the­o­rist

Free admis­sion, seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

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SUNDAY JUNE 3, 2pm-5:45pm, at the Auditorium of the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
Ananas Connection

Download the full pro­gram (only in French)

Directed by Amos Gitaï, Ananas (1984, 76 min) starts with the label of a pre­served pineapple tin on which one can read: “pro­duced in the Philippines, canned in Honolulu, dis­tributed in San Francisco”, and in the corner, “printed in Japan”. A com­bi­na­tion of his­tor­ical dis­course, tes­ti­monies and revealing images, Ananas addresses and untan­gles the var­ious strands of the global spider web that makes up a multi­na­tional fruit com­pany. Taking Ananas as a starting point, a number of spe­cial­ists whose fields of study include rubber plants, bananas or wood have been invited to give a his­tory of these well-trav­elled plants and to com­ment on the var­ious issues of their indus­trial pro­duc­tion.

Contributors:
Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, his­to­rian, Research Fellow at CNRS, CEMAf, Centre d’études des mondes africains
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, his­to­rian
Gabriela Lamy, head Gardener at the gar­dens of the Domaine de Marie-Antoinette Françoise Vergès, polit­ical sci­en­tist
Serge Volper, agronomist and archivist at the Cirad his­tor­ical library

Free entrance, but lim­ited capacity (120 seats).
Tickets can be col­lected at recep­tion from 1.30pm.