Born in the French Caribbean islands (Guadeloupe), Eddy Firmin is an artist-researcher. He holds a doctorate in Arts Studies and Practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal [Canada] and a master's degree from the visual art school of Le...
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Born in the
French Caribbean islands (Guadeloupe), Eddy Firmin is an artist-researcher. He
holds a doctorate in Arts Studies and Practices from the Université du Québec à
Montréal [Canada] and a master's degree from the visual art school of Le
Havre-Rouen [France]. He is the publishing director of the decolonial magazine
Minorit'Art. In his works, he questions the transcultural logics of his
identity and the balance of forces at play in it. On a theoretical level, he is
working on a Méthode Bossale, a proposal for the decolonization of the
imaginary in art.
Eddy
Firmin is interested in politics of knowledge sharing and epistemic conflicts
they engender for the colonized artist.
He thus seeks to remedy the codes of an ancestral practice, the Gwoka
(between dance, song, storytelling and music). The latter belongs to a
humpbacked epistemology, to a very large
family of Afro-Caribbean practices built to resist colonial violence (such as
the Paracumbé, Guineo, Bélè, Calenda, Bomba, Tambú, etc.). This compelling need
to transfer ancestral codes to recent visual mediums is due to the fact that my
islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique have not produced a visual tradition to
which I can refer because of the prohibitions of slavery on a restricted
perimeter.
Apart
from resistance, one of the main codes of this practice is lokans. Specific to
the singer/songwriter, its aim is to mask the resistance of the slaves under
the finery of a plastic song driven by technical virtuosity. The lokans is then
the shield of flowers behind which the war rumbles, because it is also the art
of double language. Thus, my practice, among other codes, uses this one.
Technicity and aesthetics aim to seduce, and the background discourse allied to
other types of codes aim to resist the master discourses (in the arts, as well
as in the social space).