Title: CRYING WATA MAMI WATA
Video performance, 2’57
Is she a mermaid? Did she survive drama? Is she a chimera?
So many bodies carried beyond the horizon line, the unknow world… So many Carried-Beyond, Caribbeans… From the ancestral land to the shores of the African Diaspora, the figure of Mami Wata is a chorus throughout the Caribbean. Manman Dlo in Guadeloupe, La Sirènn in Haiti, Yemanja or Yemaya in Cuba or Puerto Rico. Is she Oshun? Invariably, this female deity embodies women’s empowerment and their quintessential water-sourced power. In this performance video, as per usual, Nèfta Poetry (Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette) incarnates the goddess visiting the human dimension. Superimposed is also a sea creature grounded on the sand to die. This is a repeating semantics in the performer’s work: shaping analogies between woman and nature to question political, feminist and ecological issues.