Aperture
Searching for Cayenne
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Aperture n°254, Counter Histories, Spring 2024
download PDF
Like the writers Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant before her, Cédrine Scheidig is, to borrow the words of Glissant’s American translator, a distinguished theorist of "Caribbean self-formation.” Born in 1994 in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburbs northeast of Paris to a French mother and a Guadeloupean father, Scheidig began taking photographs in her early twenties. Her first mature work explored the immigrant communities in which she grew up. Her father had left Guadeloupe in the 1970s, one of many young men drawn from the Caribbean to European capitals such as London and Paris by the promise of employment and economic prosperity.
While studying in Arles, a city in southern France renowned for its art school and photography festival, Scheidig established a deliberately time-consuming, labor-intensive practice—bulky camera equipment, analog film, handmade prints—to undercut some of the more damning associations of photography as a gendered discourse and an ethnographic tool. In plain terms, this gave her multiple ways of relating to people in the process of taking their pictures. Scheidig describes photography in general as a language, and in particular as the most textured, tactile, and best language for critically engaging the world around her.
Over the past five years, Scheidig has developed an expansive body of work on the experience of Blackness in forging both regional and diasporic Afro-Caribbean identities. She has photographed young men popping wheelies in the Martinican capital, Fort-de-France, and delved into the riotous world of carnival sound systems in London’s Notting Hill. Moving nimbly from Europe to Africa, the Antilles, and Latin America, she followed tenuous but meaningful connections among young people who recognize themselves in one another despite being geographically scattered. These connections emerge through music, fashion, and hip-hop culture, which coexist in Scheidig’s photographs alongside hints of ceremonial magic, overabundant nature, and a protectively vague sense of spiritualism. True to Glissant’s playfulness with language and his insistence on associative thinking, Scheidig’s photography expresses all these elements in a barrage of arresting details. Her portraits, landscapes, and still lifes deliver alternating jolts of familiarity and strangeness as she brings objects together in unexpected combinations.
The strength of Scheidig’s most recent series, This trace where salt was (2023), dwells in the deceptive simplicities of a worn-out blue-and-white tiled floor, a Brooklyn Nets jersey, and three incongruous sets of angels’ wings. Each photograph is keyed to a larger set of historical circumstances as Scheidig attends to the specificities of hair, scarring, tattoos, bejeweled hands, and bursts of self-fashioning, as evidenced by her striking portrait of a defiant young woman, set against the murky coast of French Guiana, with a dramatic line of safety pins running down and holding together the front of her dragon-adorned crop top.
Through the photographs she produced in Cayenne, Scheidig triangulates France, the Caribbean, and the South American continent just as she reconfigures the relationship of the horizon, the ocean, and the coast, or the city, the density of the forest, and the suggestion of a spirit world. Scheidig describes This trace where salt was as both a part of her engagement with the Caribbean and a mechanism for loosening and extending that project. "I’m not working in closed circles,” she says. The series pushes her work beyond notions of islands or identities alone to consider more complicated but ultimately more productive (and more productively Glissantian) sites of encounter, collision, and entanglement.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer based in Geneva and Beirut.