To create the exhibition Daylighting, but it’s water that speaks* at La Criée, Euridice Zaituna Kala travelled around Rennes and entered into a dialogue with some of the elements that make up the city: its river, its glass and stone architecture, its people and forgotten plants, its transparencies and its reflections. It is a dialogue of interiorities and exteriorities, objective and subjective elements, stories and images. In a dynamic installation that unfolds throughout the art centre, using both industrial and blown glass, transparent images, coloured lights, ancient seeds and multilingual stories, Euridice Zaituna Kala gives a voice to the voiceless, the unheard or the forgotten: the partially enclosed river, endemic species discarded, ancestors forgotten or whose stories have been overwritten by other stories (such as urban development, petro-capitalism or the French language).
The Rennes anchoring is also overwhelmed as much as enriched by various other locales:
-- New York, where the artist completed a research residency in late 2023, during which she interrogated the connections between the megalopolis and its architecture of entrails and summits, and the people and ecosystems that preceded it, creating new connections and cracking open the purely ‘growthist’ vision of the Big Apple from her point of view as a passing outsider.
-- Maisons-Alfort, on the outskirts of Paris, where she lives and collects plural histories and edible seeds.
-- Maputo in Mozambique, where she grew up and which she recalls in a conversation that blends her voice with those of her mother, grandmother and daughter.
-- Réunion, which she visited very recently and from which she brought back the Creole language, which she mixes here with the Gallo patois.
It is precisely here, in these intersections - where the waters mingle - that Euridice Zaituna Kala’s method lies. It’s a method that superimposes situationist dérives, dialogues with ancestors, decolonial readings and creolization. Through this method, the artist, herself crossed by many histories, trajectories and languages, provokes sometimes unexpected connections and proposes a kind of pluriversalism through particularisms, a form of prospective reality nourished by bursts of colour, fragments of images and the musicality of languages that are close to us but yet largely elude us.
Euridice Zaituna Kala’s exhibition Daylighting, but it’s water that speaks brings together the voices of many struggles - ecological, feminist, indigenous - and links them to her own history and that of Rennes. The exhibition is also a vibrant, sensual and luminous tribute to the forces of life.
* In English, the excavation of a river that had previously been covered by urban infrastructure is referred to as daylighting a river. In Rennes, there are plans to restore daylight to the Vilaine at Place de la République by 2030. At present, the Vilaine is covered by a car park in the city centre.