Marie Voignier

Each of her projects is built up along a unique line of approach that is guided by the subject and the human relations it establishes. Although her works seem to be sustained by a spirit of scientific investigation and reporting, they completely avoid associating images with the narration of truth and bypass the kneejerk reactions of stereotyped discourse in order to leave an active role for the subjects themselves. "I am not in an ethnographic approach, she says, but in a desire to historicize the point of view. 

Shot in Guangzhou, Na China is a field study in one of the globalised trade centres where Africa and China come face to face. Confronted with China's economic stranglehold in Africa, an African community moved to the source in order to participate in the market by short-circuiting the route to the West. Marie Voignier particularly focuses on the personal trajectories of African women traders whose activity subverts gender stereotypes and contributes to redefining the role of women in the globalised economy. Given the difficulty of filming transactions that are meant to be discreet, the artist adopts a special method for certain scenes, using male and female actors in a form that has all the appearances of a documentary. The human dimension of hand-to-hand exchanges creates a tension with the dematerialized system in which they work. Filmed with discreet means – a mobile telephone, still camera, small movie camera – Na China reveals an extraordinary visual density. The spaces have a critical presence that is completely saturated with the paraphernalia of continuous trading: shelving, clothes rails, stalls, bags and piles of merchandise become fully fledged characters, the new fetishes around which the speculative mechanism of globalization spins in a vertiginous and anarchic manner. In this sense, the work is also a visual essay that sets afloat all definitive concepts of value: whether economic, legal, aesthetic or ethical. 

Na China was conceived in the context of the All the Way South residency accompanying the "An Inquiry – Modes of Encounter" exhibition in the Guangdong Times Museum of Guangzhou in China (curated by Biljana Ciric). 

In collaboration with: Centre national des arts plastiques, CNC, KADIST, Institut Français, SCAM, Marcelle Alix.