Vincent Meessen
2021Ultramarine
Vincent Meessen
Ultramarine is a visual poem, narrating the 'exile blues' through spoken word performance, improvised rhythms and textile display. It is a poetic essay in repoliticising one of the most universal colours, which also has colonial references. Objects and documents are rendered in words by the Afro-American poet Kain, voiced in music improvised by drummer Lander Gyselinck and animated in images by Vincent Meessen. Ultramarine is composed like a spectrum: it unfolds and intertwines fragments of meaning.
Ultramarine
Quelle que soit la longueur de la nuit
Vincent Meessen
After being expelled from France for his subversive communist activities, the Senegalese Maoist activist and artist Omar Blondin Diop (1946-73) returned to Dakar, where he joined the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa and, with his incendiary speeches against colonialism, challenged the power embodied by Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal.
Blondin Diop: A Senegalese Visionary
Juste un mouvement
Vincent Meessen
Juste un Mouvement is a free take on La Chinoise, a Jean-Luc Godard movie shot in 1967 in Paris. Reallocating its roles and characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original movie, now becomes the key character.
Just a Movement
