CAC Brétigny

“Nothing has happened here—sequel”

Curator: Daisy Lambert

Since 2018, Fanny Souade Sow has been developing the series “Nothing has happened here—sequel”, a collection of memorial plaques honouring victims of police violence and, more recently, people who died during other altercations. The plaques are dispersed within the public space without ceremony.

Initially made by hand and from various materials, they now follow a protocol: on a plaque made out of white marble appears a date and the inscription “Nothing has happened here”. The absence of a name and the serialisation of the object echoes the dehumanising “invisibilisation”, the daily violence endured by certain bodies. Her work simultaneously denounces racial violence, so-called legitimate (but in truth exclusive) memory and, by extension, the role of public statues in this process of legitimisation. 

Invited by the exhibition curator Daisy Lambert, Fanny Souade Sow will continue her reflections at CAC Brétigny. As part of her residency, she will present “Nothing has happened here—sequel”, a two-part project anchored in the area.

In collaboration with the artist, pupils from the vocational college Paul Langevin and the secondary school Jean Macé in the city Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois will investigate the idea of heritage and the challenges of memory using the monuments that populate their day-to-day life as a starting point. What forms do memorial monuments take within the public space? Are they symbols, personalities? Why were they chosen? What do they represent for the residents of an area?

The project will offer a critical approach to commemoration from a de-hierarchical perspective. The collective reflection aims to distance common “places of memory”. It will culminate in an artistic workshop: micro-monuments or counter-monuments created to host more intimate narratives, legitimising personal and singular memorials.

In a second phase, Fanny Souade Sow would like to engage in a conversation with local political actors in order to take another step towards acknowledging racial and social inequalities. Whether that relates to police violence or fights, the Essonne region is not exempt from these violent phenomena. Conceived as an open project, exchanges between the artist and local actors and actresses might make it possible to create more permanent forms of visibility within the public space.    
 

Fanny Souade Sow was born in 1994 in Versailles. She lives and works in the Paris region. Initially trained in technical drawing in graphic communication in Paris, she went on to graduate from the École supérieure d’art et de design de Grenoble–Valence in 2020. Fanny Souade Sow’s work engages with sociopolitical and historical questions. Whether that be through the form of publications, sculptures, performances or the medium of video, she denounces the effects of colonial heritage on racialised bodies. While her pieces attest to mechanisms of systematic and violent oppression, they also participate in the formulation of a collective memory. This movement of acknowledgement is a fundamental step, both in terms of repossessing marginalised bodies and reappropriating spaces. In 2019, she joined the team at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and Kinshasa for the project “Spinning Triangle”. Her artworks have been shown recently in group shows at MAC VAL—Vitry-sur-Seine (2019), Académie Royale de Bruxelles (2020), FRAC Franche-Comté—Besançon, Fondation Kadist—Paris (2021), and Galerie Eric Dupont (2022). In January 2022, she had her first solo exhibition at RECYCLART in Brussels. Fanny Souade Sow has been selected for the 66^th Salon de Montrouge.

Daisy Lambert was born in 1994. She lives and works in the Paris region. She holds degrees from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in history, art history and cultural heritage and museum studies. She went on to graduate from Sciences Po Paris with a degree in cultural policy. Daisy Lambert is now an independent art curator. Between 2016 and 2022, she took part in several group exhibition projects in France and abroad: Spot Production Fund—Istanbul, Turkey; Centre national édition art image (CNEAI)—Pantin; Van Abbemuseum—Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Le Lac—Brussels, Belgium. In 2020 and 2021, she was collection assistant at the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP). Closely linked to her curation work, she also conducts research. Committed to studying mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion within cultural institutions, in 2018 she produced an investigation into FRAC Martinique, a public regional collection of contemporary art, the history of which has been largely hidden under a veil of silence. The following year, she joined Van Abbemuseum’s queer activist group Queer Constituency. In 2020 and 2021, she collaborated again with the museum as well as the organisation Studio I to suggest ways in which queer racialised communities might be included in public art collections within the Netherlands. She also writes for the digital review Faire monde(s), which focuses on contemporary Caribbean creation. 

This residency benefits from the support of the Ministère de la Culture—DRAC Ile-de-France in the context of the SODAVI-F (Schéma d’Orientation pour les Arts Visuels) in Ile-de-France. It encompasses actions led by Fanny Souade Sow in collaboration with the Maison d’arrêt (Detention center) of Fleury-Mérogis, the middle school Jean Macé and the high school Paul Langevin of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. Fanny Souade Sow is associate artist of Daisy Lambert's curatorial residency.