In the context of the exhibition Misson Dakar-Djibouti (1931-1933) organized by the Musée du quai branly Jacques Chirac, Alice Diop talks with Gaêlle Beaujean, head curator of the African collections of the museum, about her project for a film adaption of Michel Leiris's Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa).
The exhibition is the culmination of four years of investigation into the conditions of acquisition of each object, conducted by French and African historians, archivists and researchers. Inventories, mission books, period correspondence from L'Afrique fantôme - the notebook kept by mission secretary Michel Leiris were probed and analyzed. The exhibition description is presented in this way:
Different perspectives on colonial history. The exhibition presents new research associated with one of the most emblematic missions of the 1930s.
Between 1931 and 1933, the 'Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission' journeyed through 14 African countries. Led by French ethnologist Marcel Griaule, it tested new methods of ethnographic survey and collection. In 1933, it contained over 3,000 objects, 6,000 natural specimens, as many photographs, 300 manuscripts, around 50 human remains, some 20 recordings and over 10,000 field notes resulting from observation 'surveys' or 'interrogations'. This scientific expedition also attracted a great deal of media attention with the publication of L'Afrique fantôme, the personal diary of the mission's secretary, Michel Leiris, in which he reveals the relations between the colonised and the colonialists, as well as the conditions under which the surveys and collections were carried out.
Through a selection of objects, photographs and archives, the exhibition revisits documented facts, placing at the heart of the subject the results of research and the current viewpoint of professionals from the African continent. These counter investigations, carried out jointly by a dozen African and French scientists, aim to retrace the conditions under which these heritages were acquired and collected in order to shed light on the colonial context and the stories of men and women who have remained anonymous until now.
For Alice Diop the political significance of L'Afrique fantôme as a report of the events that took place eighty years ago, is that it may now serve as a valid means to actually reclaim those objects that had been acquired in a totally fallacious and violent way.
She also views her film project as a form of counter-archive as a means to reinvent archives through fiction. Hence, giving an existence, an incarnation, a humanity, a visibility, to the people who have not been seen or filmed, heard or listened to, and in so doing, reveal their depth, intimacy, sensitivity.
The exhibition is the culmination of four years of investigation into the conditions of acquisition of each object, conducted by French and African historians, archivists and researchers. Inventories, mission books, period correspondence from L'Afrique fantôme - the notebook kept by mission secretary Michel Leiris were probed and analyzed. The exhibition description is presented in this way:
Different perspectives on colonial history. The exhibition presents new research associated with one of the most emblematic missions of the 1930s.
Between 1931 and 1933, the 'Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission' journeyed through 14 African countries. Led by French ethnologist Marcel Griaule, it tested new methods of ethnographic survey and collection. In 1933, it contained over 3,000 objects, 6,000 natural specimens, as many photographs, 300 manuscripts, around 50 human remains, some 20 recordings and over 10,000 field notes resulting from observation 'surveys' or 'interrogations'. This scientific expedition also attracted a great deal of media attention with the publication of L'Afrique fantôme, the personal diary of the mission's secretary, Michel Leiris, in which he reveals the relations between the colonised and the colonialists, as well as the conditions under which the surveys and collections were carried out.
Through a selection of objects, photographs and archives, the exhibition revisits documented facts, placing at the heart of the subject the results of research and the current viewpoint of professionals from the African continent. These counter investigations, carried out jointly by a dozen African and French scientists, aim to retrace the conditions under which these heritages were acquired and collected in order to shed light on the colonial context and the stories of men and women who have remained anonymous until now.
For Alice Diop the political significance of L'Afrique fantôme as a report of the events that took place eighty years ago, is that it may now serve as a valid means to actually reclaim those objects that had been acquired in a totally fallacious and violent way.
She also views her film project as a form of counter-archive as a means to reinvent archives through fiction. Hence, giving an existence, an incarnation, a humanity, a visibility, to the people who have not been seen or filmed, heard or listened to, and in so doing, reveal their depth, intimacy, sensitivity.
Alice Diop's project parallels with Mati Diop’s Dahomey—which mixes fantasy fiction and documentary—from the basements of the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac to the presidential palace in Cotonou, who accompanies the return journey of illegally-acquired statues to their country of origin. She gives voice to both the stolen statues and the Beninese students, immersing the viewer within the heart of the postcolonial debate on the restitution of African material heritage by European countries. She describes the objective of the film: “to return to these twenty-six royal treasures their story, their voices, to make them the narrators and actors of their own epic return." Alice Diop’s project seeks to exhume the parts that remain silent, those in the shadows, the missing parts, the things that Michel Leiris did not see, could not see or omitted to say. Similar to Mati Diop it is also a means for her to free herself from the hegemony of western knowledge production. Mati Diop described her experience in this way: “As a Franco-Senegalese, afro-descendant cineaste, I chose to be among those who refuse to forget, who refuse amnesia as a method.”
