Chris Cyrille et Smaïl Kanouté

Born in 1994, Chris Cyrille graduated from Université Paris 8 with a degree in philosophy, art history and art theory. A poet, researcher and exhibition storyteller, he has written articles for several French magazines. Alongside his research into new practices in art criticism and curating, he is interested in Afro-diasporic and Caribbean aesthetics and philosophies, based on places of struggle such as the mangrove swamp.

From 2018 to 2019, he works as a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou. In 2021, he is conceptualizing and organizing the exhibition ” Mais le monde est une mangrovité “. He is also a member of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Arts), JCA (Jeunes Critiques d’Art) and received the Prix Dauphine pour l’Art contemporain (2017), the Prix Jeune Commissariat of the 69th edition of Jeune Création, and the Prix AICA in 2020. A member of the international scientific committee of the Slave Route Project, he is also a laureate of the Bourse Émergence 2022 (ADIAF).

Smaïl Kanouté was born in Paris in 1986, works and lives in Paris. Graduating with a Master’s degree in graphic design from ENSAD in 2012, he defines himself as a “choreographer” and self-taught in dance through his travels in the streets of France, Brazil, Mali and Europe. Blending dance and the visual arts, his choreography becomes a painting of motifs in motion in space. A gatherer of world stories and storyteller of social facts, his work is fueled by artistic and multicultural influences. He toured from 2011 to 2013 as part of Raphaëlle Delaunay’s show Bitter Sugar, before founding Compagnie Vivons in 2016, with whom he develops his own performance projects and choreographic works. Among the most recent, Yasuke Kurosan (June 2022) was supported by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. In 2021, several of his short films will be shown at the MAC in Lyon and the Studio de la MEP in Paris. Artist in residence at Ateliers Médicis, Espace 1789, Centquatre-Paris and MC93, he joins Villa Médicis as a resident in duo with Chris Cyrille.

Chris Cyrille and Smaïl Kanouté continue their Sch-isthme exhibition project at Villa Médicis, conceived as part of the cross-residency program with Ateliers Médicis in Clichy-Montfermeil: The world is a variation of motifs that only differ in encounter. As they interlock, they become entangled and form infinite remixes. We imagine the world from the perspective of black music, identifying three figures that we see as a science of black diasporas: the break, the sample and the remix. How, indeed, in the radical casualization of the living, in the murder of all imaginative effort, in the effects of cuts that depopulate bodies, can we reclaim time that is everywhere caught up in the hegemony of a white present? What is this present for us? Using Smaïl Kanouté’s videos, we’ll try to create our own time in three durations (each punctuated by the works of guest artists and a narrative composed of three scattered songs): the time of resistance (Never Twenty One), the time of a “healthy encounter” (Yasuke Kurosan) and the time of a recited prayer (Sô Ava). And the whole will create a loop that will repeat itself from Benin to Japan.