Exposition : Monika Emmanuelle Kazi au Centre culturel suisse

The places we inhabit often continue to inhabit us. Monika Emmanuelle Kazi's practice revives domestic spaces and family memories nourished by a diasporic experience between Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo, where she grew up, and Paris.

09: Vernissage Radio Nova invites the public to continue the evening on the CCS plateau with two concerts. Free entry from 8 PM + With terrain meuble, the artist transforms the CCS into an architecture traversed by memories. A structure of mobile display panels occupies the space.

The walls become projection surfaces where family narratives, traces of childhood, and broader stories related to colonial legacies, economic exchanges, and the flows of raw materials and resources emerge.

At the heart of the project is a particular attention to building materials and what they tell. Cement, introduced to the African continent during the colonial period to build “in hard,” gradually replaced vernacular materials better suited to local climates.

By hindering the natural circulation of air and humidity, it reveals condensations and halos on the walls that Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reinterprets as drawings or crystallizations of memory.

Conversely, tropical woods exported to Europe reappear in her works in the form of marquetry, revealing other circulations of materials, values, and histories.

The title terrain meuble evokes both the mobility, instability, and humidity of a perpetually transforming soil, inscribing her mobile-furniture installation within this same ecosystem. Composed of mobile wooden panels, it is traversed by details, traces, and layers of memory.

By perforating the display panels, the artist reveals their framework and allows sand to flow through the interstices. Pyrogravures, sapele (Congolese mahogany) marquetry, and fragments of wallpaper inscribe intimate and transcontinental narratives into this moving architecture.