Diasporic Affections

« Las fronteras son siempre lugares que sangran. »
Jorge Díaz et Johan Mijail,
Inflamadas de retórica.
 

Diasporic Affections is not an endpoint. Born out of a collective curatorial and artistic gesture that reexamines borders, this exhibition arises from the intersection of different trajectories, where coexist narratives that never occur on their own. This is the essence of diasporic narratives: they can only be read, seen, and heard when transformed, displaced, and reinvented by what surrounds them—memories, voices, materials, struggles, songs, poems, and others. It is almost a sentence. Diasporized individuals wrestle with magnificent stories, constantly retold as they move through the history of their lives.

This exhibition addresses this condition, this sensitivity that makes us desperately reluctant to fossilized and coagulated discourses that seek to contain our cultures, journeys and languages, to singularize our origins, and to separate our emotions from all struggle and thought. We may then react viscerally to this tendency in our civilization to separate everything: we return to our old stories, or rather, we turn our old stories over to turn the world on itself, showing that for us, nothing is still and that everything moves us. It is an extraordinary affection that, from our diasporas, transfigures our narratives.

Diasporic Affections is my response to the invitation from the Phorie collective (formed by Benoit Jodoin and Félix Chartré-Lefebvre) to move beyond my comfort zone—literature—and enter the realm of exhibition, drawing inspiration from the work of artists to continue my exploration of diasporic issues, which I began in 2017 with Vueltas. In this vast interdisciplinary research-creation project, diasporas are conceived as spaces that generate affective experiences, shifting, unstable constellations that provoke transformations in migrant subjects and their cultures—processes of diasporization. 

With this exhibition, I wanted to imagine a relational diasporic space where identities and cultures crystallize into micro-narratives of various forms, meeting, transforming, celebrating the opacity of languages, and experimenting with the dead ends of translation, all while revealing the imperialist, colonial, and bloody ways in which nations draw borders and recount migratory routes. The aim is to go beyond the simple question of immigration and, on the margins of the dominant discourses of Western history, explore the complexity of the stories produced by an intimate and affective relationship with diasporas. The works of Hamza Abouelouafaa, Gem Chang-Kue, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Poline Harbali, and Laïla Mestari intersect these three notions—diaspora, narrative and affect. By bringing them together, we invite visitors to appreciate in a holistic way phenomena such as memory, migration, and the infinite transformations they encourage.​

Nicholas Dawson

Francisco-Fernando Granados, letter, 2024, Digital drawing, 8.5x11in. © SBC galerie d’art contemporain