Events

FRIDAY APRIL 20, 6-9pm
Opening with a performance by the artist Otobong Nkanga.

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WEDNESDAY MAY 2 AND JUNE 2, AND SATURDAY JULY 7, 3.30pm
Tour of the Garden of Tropical Agronomy led by Serge Volper, archivist at the Historical Library of the Cirad (Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development).

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SATURDAY JULY 7, 1.30pm
Picnic with a commentary by Serge Volper.
CANCELLATION
Due to an instable whether, we must cancel the picnic. Please come to see the exhibition instead. Specific visits will be programmed.

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FRIDAY JUNE 29, 7pm
Talk around the issues related to the project Tropicomania and to La Triennale by Françoise Vergès, scientific curator of the exhibition

Françoise Vergès is Consulting Professor at Goldsmiths College, London and President of the Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. She receives proposals to collaborate with artists - Isaac Julien, Caecilia Tripp, Sylvie Blocher, Yinka Shonibare... -, and with numerous art projects and exhibitions (recently, One caption hides another at Bétonsalon). She is the author of Maryse Condé’s 2011 portrait for the collection Empreintes. She is preparing, in the framework of La Triennale, guided tours at Le Louvre with invited artists and authors on the subject of « The Slave in the Louvre ». Françoise Vergès publishes in French and English on slavery and its heritage today, abolitionist doctrines, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and the « postcolonial » museum.

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Saturday talks at Bétonsalon, 3pm

SATURDAY APRIL 21, 3pm
Talk by the artist Maria Thereza Alves

Maria Thereza Alves was born in Brazil in 1961; she lives and works in Europe. Her research focuses on social and cultural phenomena, working particularly with situations which question social circumstances about what we think we know and who we think we are; she explores instead where and how we actually are at this time. Alves has exhibited her work at (selection): the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Lyon Biennale, the Kunsthalle in Basel, Manifesta in Trento, the Guangzhou Triennale, the Prague Triennale, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Fondazione Sandretto in Turin, the Berlin Film Festival, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Liverpool Biennale. Her upcoming projects include Documenta 13 in Kassel and a retrospective at the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne, Nantes.

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SATURDAY APRIL 28, 3pm
Tour of the exhibition by Serge Volper, scientific curator

Serge Volper is an agronomist and archivist at the Cirad historical library, Nogent-sur-Marne. He has researched a number of food crops including rice and has worked in countries such as Mali, Togo, Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, Rwanda and Madagascar. He recently published From cocoa vanilla - A history of colonial plants, Quae, 2011.

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SATURDAY MAY 5, 3pm
Talk by ethnologist Pascal Dibie on the domestication of plants.

Pascal Dibie is a writer, ethnologist and teacher-researcher at Paris Diderot University.

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SATURDAY MAY 12, 3pm
Talk by anthropologist Maya Leclercq on the history of rooibos, between merchants and heritage issues

Maya Leclercq holds a PhD in social anthropology and works for the associative consulting firm AnthropoLinks, which she co-founded.

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SATURDAY MAY 19, 3pm
Talk by Serge Volper, scientific curator of the exhibition, on the introduction and cultivation of tropical plants

Serge Volper is an agronomist and archivist at the Cirad historical library, Nogent-sur-Marne. He has researched a number of food crops including rice and has worked in countries such as Mali, Togo, Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, Rwanda and Madagascar. He recently published From cocoa vanilla - A history of colonial plants, Quae, 2011.

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SATURDAY MAY 26, 3pm
Talk by Isabelle Barbéris on floral scenography in the arts

Isabelle Barberis is a teacher-researcher at Paris Diderot University in Humanities and Arts.

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SATURDAY JUNE 9, 3pm
Talk by the artist Yo-Yo Gonthier on his project OUTRE-MER (2003-2012)

Yo-Yo Gonthier is born in Niamey, Niger, in 1974. He graduated with a Masters in Photography and Multimedia from Paris VIII University in 1997 and has since been working as a freelance photographer, primarily based in Paris. The object of his work is the erasure of memory in a western world where the essential values seem to be speed, progress and technology. He seeks the sense of wonder, in a tension between attraction and repulsion, bringing his own interpretation to night-time photography and the use of light and dark/chiaroscuro. He is also interested in the remnants of France’s colonial past, investigating the friction between history and memory in the Outre-Mer project, nominated for the Prix kodak de la critique in 2005. He completed a commission for the Parc de la Villette, Paris for the 2009 Kréyol Factory exhibition. He participated in the Biennial of African Photography in Bamako, Mali, in 2005 and 2009 and in 2010, he is invited too coordinate a project mixing photography, sound and music ,for the first edition of the Addis Foto Fest, in Ethiopia. He is currently in residence with the City of Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis, France, until june 2013.

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SATURDAY JUNE 16, 3pm
Talk by Chantal Liaroutzos on agricultural treatises and travelogues of the 16th and 17th centuries

Chantal Liaroutzos is a lecturer in Humanities at the University Paris Diderot.

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SATURDAY JUNE 23, 3pm
Talk by Ségolène Lavaud and Crystel Pinçonnat on the significance of nature in Haitian literature and paintings

After a life spent working in fashion and communications, and punctuated by numerous trips to Haiti, Ségolène Lavaud took up studies in 2000 at Paris Diderot University. In 2005, she completed her Master thesis under the direction of Crystel Pinçonnat on "Jacques Roumain - Jacques Stephen Alexis - The marvellous realism of two Haitian writers metamorphosed by painters, ’boss metal’ and sculptors". Since completing her PhD in 2011, she has been an auditor and a participant to the NGO ’Haïti Futur’.

Crystel Pinçonnat, lecturer in comparative literature at Denis Diderot University of Paris, published "New York, mythe littéraire français" (Droz, 2001). Her recent works focuses on « minority » literature (afro-american, amerindian, and chicana). She will publish a book on narrations produced by heirs of Algerian immigration in France and Mexican in United States.

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SATURDAY JUNE 30, 3pm
Talk by the artist Marie Preston and Evelyne Cohen, from department of photographic archives at Ministry of Culture and Communication

Marie Preston is born in 1980; she lives and works in Paris. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts of Paris and holds a PhD in Visual Arts and Art Sciences. She teaches photography and video at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Through her artistic work, she develops collaborations based on encounters including activities in specific territories: knitting with the Association des Femmes Maliennes de Montreuil, trips on foot between Saint-Denis and Paris, documentary work on a ritual practice in India and shared gardens in Paris. For Tropicomania, Marie Preston has undertaken two parallel actions: a workshop in collaboration with Paris Diderot (to which Evelyne Cohen has participated [1]) in which a film about the Garden of Tropical Agronomy has been produced, and a work with du Breuil horticultural school. She is a member of the collective RADO.

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SATURDAY JULY 21, 3pm
Talk by Jonathan Chauveau : Ananas Obsession

Pineapple is for the modern world what apple was in the Christian West: an archetypal fruit symbol. This theory is the origin of a research led by Jonathan Chauveau for several months. At Bétonsalon - Centre of art and research, he will talk about the progress of his investigation about “the cultural pineapple”. He will speak about some artists like Cyril Aboucaya, Luis Buñel, Amos Gitaï, Camille Henrot or Bruno Peinado.

Jonathan Chauveau (born in 1978) is a contributor of the contemporary art magazine FROG. He is also curator and journalist.

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Study days

SATURDAY JUNE 2, 11am-7pm at the Jacques Kerchache Reading Room, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
The agricultural theatre: vernacular knowledge, sustainable development and green imperialism

Download the full program (only in French):

The agricultural theatre: vernacular knowledge, sustainable development and green imperialism The agricultural theatre: vernacular knowledge, sustainable development and green imperialism is a study day dedicated to exploring the political, socio-economic, legal and ecological stakes of the production, transformation and distribution of agriculture, historically and today. Anthropologists, historians, theoreticiens and professionals of food commerce and distribution have been brought together to address themes ranging from the intellectual property of local knowledge, to the standardisation of agricultural produces, and to question the nuances and contradictions inherent in the idea of sustainable development. The agricultural theatre puts into perspective subjects located at the heart of the speculative and legal battles between multinationals, agrarian politics and land workers, and interrogates, through the experience and research of the participants, the present and the possible futures of agriculture under the sign of biodiversity and social justice.

Contributors:
Benoit Daviron, researcher in research economics and management at Cirad, ‘environments and societies’ department
Max-Henri Léon, project manager working in food distribution
Birgit Müller, research fellow at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie des institutions et des organisations sociales, EHESS
Marie Phliponeau, associate researcher at Laboratoire Erasme de l’Institut Maghreb-Europe, Paris 8 University
Jean-Claude Rabeherifara, sociologist and Adjunct Director of CILDA, Centre international des industries de la langue et du développement - Afrique-Amériques-Asie - Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense
Frédéric Thomas, research fellow at IRD, Institute of research for development), historian of sciences and engineering, and geographer
Françoise Vergès, political theorist

Free admission, seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

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SUNDAY JUNE 3, 2pm-5:45pm, at the Auditorium of the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
Ananas Connection

Download the full program (only in French)

Directed by Amos Gitaï, Ananas (1984, 76 min) starts with the label of a preserved pineapple tin on which one can read: “produced in the Philippines, canned in Honolulu, distributed in San Francisco”, and in the corner, “printed in Japan”. A combination of historical discourse, testimonies and revealing images, Ananas addresses and untangles the various strands of the global spider web that makes up a multinational fruit company. Taking Ananas as a starting point, a number of specialists whose fields of study include rubber plants, bananas or wood have been invited to give a history of these well-travelled plants and to comment on the various issues of their industrial production.

Contributors:
Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, historian, Research Fellow at CNRS, CEMAf, Centre d’études des mondes africains
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, historian
Gabriela Lamy, head Gardener at the gardens of the Domaine de Marie-Antoinette Françoise Vergès, political scientist
Serge Volper, agronomist and archivist at the Cirad historical library

Free entrance, but limited capacity (120 seats).
Tickets can be collected at reception from 1.30pm.