Alexandre Erre
Fair Trade

From April 27 to June 23, 2023
Opening on April 27 from 5 pm to 7 pm

The opening will be followed by a dv_vd screening: Empreintes cinétiques. Rachel Echenberg at 7 pm

Alexandre Erre was born in 1990 in Nouméa, Kanaky-New-Caledonia. He lives and works between France and his native country. His artistic approach revolves around his experience as a queer person coming from Melanesia, and celebrating the cultures and communities from Oceania. More broadly, he explores issues related to memory, exoticization and insularity. His research is based on his personal history, and draws on his vernacularity and diasporic present. In his work, he seeks to open space for healing and pleasure in response to the violence that populates our daily lives and our imagination. More than a specific formal research in a conscripted field, he adapts to the issues and contexts he explores, with the intention to work with ethics and caring.

Fair Trade activates a common porcelain plate from the Lenox British Colonial collection as an emblem and receptacle for colonial fantasies of unspecified tropical oceanic territories. Austerely and choreographically, tea is poured up to the brim of the shallow dish. Two collaborators take turns sipping, tipping the tea back and forth, creating a wave between them. In this intimate and almost solemn gesture, passing fluid from one mouth to another until none remains, notions of sharing intervene upon business and commercial exchanges. In his own description, the artist names the tea “lymph” — that vital body fluid responsible for recirculating proteins to the body’s disparate parts, pointing also to colonialism’s enduring embodied memory.

The text featured in Le radeau de la joie is cited from “Notice à l’usage des futurs colons en Nouvelle-Calédonie” (Notice for future colonists in New-Caledonia), a document published in 1930. Written to incite inhabitants of the French territory to embark on France’s colonial enterprise, it was, in other terms, an exhaustive manual for successfully reaping the benefits of the colonized Pacific territory. The video image, meanwhile, captures young people swimming to and fro a dock out in the shimmering ocean. Edited to play in reverse, it becomes a sort of ballet of impossible spinning and leaping. The scene is so beautiful one might wonder who is watching — if not investors scouting for fruitful returns — but the scene is so saturated with authentic joy, that the work becomes a study in glorification and its many possible relationships to reality. That is, the artist seems to override the cynical gaze with celebration of his home island and of the potential of its youth. 

Fair Trade (2017) — 8 min. 42 sec.
Le radeau de la joie (2017) — 13 min. 32 sec.