17 NOV – 16h

II - THE ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE - DIALOGUE 

Anne Christine Taylor (Musée du Quai Branly, former director of research) 
Maria Thereza Alves (Artist born in Brazil of indigenous, settler and african descent)

EHESS | Room M. et D. Lombard, 96 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris

Proposition

This dialogue seeks to engage horizontally with the research processes of the social sciences and contemporary art. Maria Thereza Alves has conducted extensive work on silenced histories and articulates her practice through a very particular artistic research process. Her experience of working with indigenous communities speaks very much to notions of how visions of Brazil are concretised and sedimented, and how knowledge production is restricted to within certain spaces. Anne Christine Taylor’s work places questions of indigeneity within different contexts and her experience at the Quai Branly has amplified debate on how discourse can be rendered plastic or otherwise sedimented, and how knowledge production can be configured through (non)material exhibits. This dialogue will engage with indigenous ways of seeing and knowing in the context of art, bringing a focus to bear on how different kinds of knowledge can be produced.

Bios

Anne Christine Taylor is an anthropologist with a research trajectory that focuses on Amazonian societies. She is is the former Director of Research at the Musée du Quai Branly. Taylor's research focuses on perceptions and experiences of history within Indigenous societies and on indigenous conceptions of psychic processes and self-experience. Although her work resists categorization to any particular school, its general approach belongs to a theoretical constellation of works that could be described as "structural phenomenology". She is one of the principal figures of the "Franco-Brazilian" Americanist school, which has pursued (but also displaced) the objectives of the Levi-Straussian structuralism.

Maria Thereza Alves is a Brazilian artist of indigenous, settler and african descent whose work puts forward a research process focused on social and cultural phenomena. Alves focuses on concepts that question social circumstances; concerning what we think we know, who we think we are and suggesting we look instead at where and how we actually are at this time. Maria Thereza has exhibited in the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, (d)OCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, the Moscow Biennial and the Lyon Biennial where she received the Prix de la Francophonie. In 2015 sh completed a major solo exhibition in the Centre Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) Seville, Spain. The New School for Social Research in New York has awarded Alves the 2016 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, which honors artists “who have taken great risks to advance social justice in a profound and visionary way.”

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II -  LE MUSÉE ETHNOGRAPHIQUE ET LE SAVOIR INDIGÈNE - Conversation

Anne Christine Taylor (Ancienne Directrice de la recherche au Musée du Quai Branly)
Maria Thereza Alves (Artiste née au Brésil d'origine autochtone, coloniale et africaine)

Proposition

Ce dialogue vise à provoquer une réflexion croisée entre les champs des sciences sociales et ceux de l'art contemporain. Maria Thereza Alves a une pratique artistique singulière qui utilise des histoires de marginalité et de mises en scène. Son expérience de travail avec des communautés autochtones du Brésil est révélatrice des notions de "concrétisation" et de "sédimentation" à l'œuvre dans la construction des imaginaires sur le Brésil. Elle questionne l'inégale reconnaissance des savoirs selon la qualité des espaces qui les produisent, et  la puissance des hégémonies épistémiques d’où ils découlent. Le travail d'Anne Christine Taylor porte sur les questions d'indigénéité placées dans différents contextes. Son travail au Musée du Quai Branly a permis d'élargir le débat sur la façon dont un discours peut être rendu plastique ou être sédimenté de manière nouvelle, ainsi que sur la manière dont la production de connaissances peut être configurée à travers des expositions non matérielles.

Cet échange permettra d’aborder la question importante de l’affirmation des regards et des savoirs autochtones dans le contexte de l'art mettant ainsi l'accent sur la manière dont des types inédits de connaissances peuvent émerger.

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