Camera Austria
Circuits of Blackness
Serubiri Moses, Camera Austria 167, 2024

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Looking for a metaphor for Cédrine Scheidig’s imagery, I gravitated toward zouk, which is a musical genre born and popularized in Cayenne, a city in the French Caribbean, and connected further off to France and West Africa. Artist and curator Marie-Julie Chalu writes in the exhibition catalogue An Open Anthology of Afro-French Songs that: “Zouk, in its genesis, is an Afro-diasporic, Afro-Atlantic music, from Pointe-à-Pitre to Fort-de-France, through Abidjan, Kinshasa, Luanda, Dakar, Yaoundé, and Paris. . . . We can already call it transnational music.”¹ I view Scheidig’s imagery through zouk, because of its movements and circuits, through the French Caribbean and beyond.

I t follows a map of Blackness that is outside the Anglophone world, and this is one of the main insights of Scheidig’s work. I would argue that zouk enables one to inhabit a world, such as that depicted in her imagery of French Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The artist’s biography, too, recalls the circuits of zouk. Scheidig was born in Paris to working-class parents and grew up listening to her parents’ music, including Kassav’, a popular band that is said to have started the musical sound of zouk. An alternative biography states that the musical sound was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, in 1983. And Scheidig would return to Cayenne to continue her creative practice. Even the fact that Jacob Desvarieux, a founder of the band Kassav’, would be born in Paris, but declare that “It is not my home,” reminds of the circuits which are properly diasporic.² In a similar way, Scheidig is unmoored by the movements of popular music made by Black people in Dakar, Cayenne, or Paris. This insight is central to her work.

Starting with a focus on questions that concern Black experience, the artist’s work ultimately engages with theoretical and conceptual problems relating to the construction of identities. Geography plays a role in her inquiry, but so do history, race, and culture. Though her inquiry is essentially centered in the French Caribbean, its geographical boundaries stretch toward France and the United States, and thus “Blackness” is pushed beyond notions of nationality, even limiting ideas of ethnicity toward sensibility and/or expression.

Looking at the series Cette trace où fut le sel (This Trace Where Salt Was, 2023), it includes a photograph of a Black man wearing his hair in shoulder-length dreadlocks, and in sportswear, a sleeveless basketball jersey with the word “Brooklyn” on it. These markers of sportswear fashion are typical of hip-hop streetwear in New York City, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The Black man looks firmly at the camera, with what looks like a smirk, a half-smile. He is wearing four pieces of jewelry around his neck: one with an eagle as a pendant. The image was taken in the French Caribbean and documents the attempt to belong to a place through popular culture and expression. Yet without much knowledge, the unacquainted viewer of Scheidig’s art will think of this imagery as a document of Black people in the United States. On the one hand, this is because the °“Black experience” and “Black identity” have been so thoroughly defined within a set of Anglophone texts, the center of which has been the United States. At the core, or the root, of Scheidig’s project is the study of Blackness within a Francophone context.

Known for her historical fiction set in Africa and the French Caribbean, a passage from Maryse Condé’s novel Victoire reminds me of Scheidig’s photographic series Les Mornes, le feu (The Dunes, the Fire, 2022). The passage inspires an imagination of Guadeloupe and draws together this vast beauty of the infinite glare of the sun, the “stunted” savannah (a tropical vista), and speaks of what that amount of direct sunlight may have done to an enslaved person working away in sugarcane plantations during the colonial era. According to Florabelle Spielmann, Guadeloupe is “a former French colony where a sugar plantation economy based on slave labor was established during the 18th century Atlantic slave trade. Slavery ended in 1848 and gave ground to a complex colonial society based on a class-color hierarchy. In 1946, Guadeloupe became an overseas department of France. . . .” Condé was interested in the significant currents in history that shape today’s politics and morality. In her novel, she produces images that are both tragic and beautiful. I am thinking here of Scheidig’s image titled Bay from the series Les Mornes, le feu which depicts the sea in the background, and the horizon covered by majestic palm trees. It is an idyllic setting, except that the foreground is a graveyard with brightly tiled tombs and their crucifixes.

In terms of genre, Scheidig’s imagery goes beyond being merely a document of the facts of a story—by looking at the landscape as a sphere for a visual imagination of post-slavery and the postcolonial. Landscape photographs that survey the aftermath of the sugar plantations, or indeed the aftermath of the rural-to-urban migration, imbuing the city with a logic of the countryside; it is such aspects that visibly shape and influence the artist’s photographs. The image titled Blue Water is from the series Les Mornes, le feu, which is set in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It reminds me of the ways that the outdoors become a kind of extension of the household. In the photograph, a transparent white plastic jerry can holding a blue liquid is placed at the foot of a Jacaranda tree. This is a holding place not only for the bottle but for the community of people that lives here. It is a way of life that mirrors the humbleness of the countryside within the town. In her pursuit of the circuits of Blackness, from Cayenne to Paris, Scheidig reveals a strategy that relates to the origin and movement of Black culture across geography and history, a perspective that can be decidedly political in her attention to Black people, when juxtaposed with the romance of the Caribbean as an exotic paradise devoid of these people. It is possible that these circuits of Blackness, simi- lar to those shaping the musical sound of zouk, speak in Scheidig’s work to culture as a form of resistance in the post-slavery era. Centering the post-slavery city and the aesthetic sensibilities of young Black people, the photographer shows this “small place” as facing the world at large. 1 Marie-Julie Chalu, Andie Oxybel, Audrey Célestine, “Zouk Vintage: Excerpt of episode 3, Paris, La Migration Antillaise et le Zouk,” trans. Aïda Sidhoum, in An Open Anthology of Afro-French Songs, ed. Aïda Sidhoum (New York: Bard College, 2024), pp. 46–49.

1. Marie-Julie Chalu, Andie Oxybel, Audrey Célestine, “Zouk Vintage: Excerpt of episode 3, Paris, La Migration Antillaise et le Zouk,” trans. Aïda Sidhoum, in An Open Anthology of Afro-French Songs, ed. Aïda Sidhoum (New York: Bard College, 2024), pp. 46–49.