Les Langues de la Pythie
Les Langues de la Pythie
Based on a research project initiated in 2019, Les Langues de la Pythie is Vir Andres Hera’s first solo exhibition in France.
Within an installation presenting three of the six chapters of the film installation Le Daftar, the artist stages an atemporal and symbolic journey carried by four characters. They move through Bronze Age ruins, an abandoned colonial house, a monastery buried in sand, and a former slave port. These sites, marked by sedimented histories, point to the colonial past of Europe.
The personal narratives of the characters intersect with the collective histories of the countries they come from, questioning migratory trajectories, mnemonic landmarks, and the untranslatability of grief, communion, and ways of perceiving and recording time. The work unfolds through a porous relationship between individual memory and historical violence, between language as a tool of transmission and as a site of loss.
Experimental and intuitive, Vir Andres Hera’s practice is inhabited by oneiric figures, sacred landscapes, emancipatory narratives, and situated forms of knowledge. Composed of films, installations, sound works, performances, and writings, their practice operates within the interstices of moving image, new technologies, orality, and literature. The work engages with the coexistence and friction of multiple linguistic realities, as well as with the plurality of bodies that speak them.
Drawing from queer imaginaries, Chicana thought, and Black studies, the artist reclaims both vernacular and scholarly remnants in order to rethink the legacies of colonial pasts. Their practice is oriented toward both pasts and futures, traversing layered processes of sedimentation and memory. Favoring partial, alternative narratives, the works fracture the signifiers of a linear, monolithic vision of history.
Constantly redefining their forms, the works migrate from one medium to another. A film may become a performance, then an essay, then a film again. The projects emerge through processes of complicity and interdisciplinary affinity, allowing the artist to work “with and through others,” “at the risk of others,” and at the risk of their own transformation.
Ife Day, Daniel Galicia, Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa, Leonce Konan Noah.
Belinda Zhawi, Alexandre Cabanne, Mahesh Batsou, Cheb Runner
Tom Gineyts, Onni Devii, Malika Najoua.
Belinda is a Zimbabwean literary and sound artist exploring Afrodiasporic narratives, colonial legacies and sound-text performance.
Cheb Runner is a Moroccan-born producer, composer and DJ blending traditional sounds with electronic music across genres.
Eva is an independent curator based in France, working on feminism, postcolonial studies and critical writing.
Fabienne is an artist working between contemporary art and textile design, developing long-term projects through collaboration with textile communities.
Daniel is a Mexican performer and artist exploring identity, migration and intimacy through drawing, painting and performance.
Alexandre is a French-Tunisian cinematographer based in Brussels, working across experimental, independent and mainstream cinema.
Zipho is a South African artist and curator focusing on communality, encounter and collective cultural practices.
Tom is a director of photography exploring light and framing.
Mahesh is a French-Indian composer and sound designer creating experimental scores in dialogue with visual art and performance.
Leonce is an Ivorian choreographer and visual artist based in France, working with heterolingual practices and embodied everyday gestures.
Artist writer and performer who works from an ecology of recurring motifs such as dream, wandering and childhood, in order to reinvent the commons and counter all unidirectional trajectories.
