Aware and moved by the challenges of this green revolution, I wish to share my ideas and sensitive experiences to contribute to this cause which has become elementary and urgent. In the continuity of my reflections on art and collective trauma, my contribution participates in a realisation of the inequalities, the major disturbances due to the impact of the digital revolution on bodies in the 21st century, whose depletion of primary resources, both human and natural, are only the hidden face of a systemic wave.
OTO is a platform as a stimulating "collaboration of thinking" where the exchange and circulation of information and knowledge create a dynamism, a strong collective experience to confront societal changes, including the ongoing green revolution. The global ecological transition must destabilize us. We must mobilize our constant and collective efforts to find sustainable solutions in which the place of living beings is at work in the transformations in which each individual becomes a subject of the world.
The OTO collective proposes a polyphonic approach that takes into account the devastation of the Earth as a common habitat in an active ethical approach. It is an honour and a necessity to contribute with this collective of thinkers to the perspectives and fruitful paths for a Glissantian body-world, in what remains to be saved.
Pélagie Gbaguidi lives and works in Brussels.
Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary "Griot". Her work is an anthology of signs and traces on the trauma. This readjustment of the imaginary arouses in the artist the urgency to give it form, a writing of liberating images and a corpus to draw contemporary forms. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions at Stadtmuseum, Munich (Germany) 2013, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Germany ) 2014, “Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists”, National Museum of African Art -Smithsonian Institution, Washington (USA) 2015, Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel 2017, "Multiple Transmissions" at Wiels (Brussels) and at the Lubumbashi Biennial 2019, 11th Berlin Biennale 2020, Centrale for Contemporary Art in Brussels, Gallery L’Atelier Nantes, Congoville Middelheim Antwerp, Zone de Troc II at the Kunsfestivaldesarts in 2021. Upcoming exhibition collective Triennale 10 Ottignies - Louvain la Neuve, Dessiner c’est Ecrire at Pompidou Center Metz in October.
“The exploitation of bodies has lasted for too long. The psychological horror of time runs through us. As a griotte, a living archive, I wonder how we can create spaces for coexistence that allow us to deal with our common vertigo? We have to mobilize our collective efforts in a transformative work in which all subjectivities become worldly.” (Pélagie Gbaguidi)