A lecture and artist’s book presentation by Mame-Fatou Niang

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Mame-Fatou Niang will introduce Néoblaste, the artist’s book from her 2023-2024 residency at the Ateliers Médicis in Clichy-Montfermeil, east of Paris. Néoblaste presents sound tapestries and artworks created with displaced residents of La Forestière, a neighborhood swallowed up by urban renewal.

Sounds of the Parisian banlieues usually bring up the noises that former French president  Jacques Chirac said “drive the French worker crazy”:  police sirens and rowdy gangs of black and Maghrebi teens, blasting sound systems, street racing and the clamor of riots. Abetted by mainstream filmic and literary representations of the French urban peripheries, these jarring noises have muffled the sounds of the ordinary: children in a playground, a lawn sprinkler and the melody of an ice cream truck, birds chirping and the jingling glass bangles of a mother.

Drawing from fieldwork and a yearlong intimate art journey with five residents, Niang analyzes the potential of soundscapes as archives of the quotidian that belie the commonly held conceptions of the banlieue. The lecture will also interrogate the contribution of oft-neglected ways of listening, hearing, recording and storing sounds in the current national debate on monumentalization and (contested) heritage sites.

Mame-Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French Studies, the Founder | Director of the Center for Black European Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and an Artist-in-Residence at Ateliers Médicis. Her previous books include Identités Françaises (2019) and Universalisme, co-written with Julien Suaudeau (2022).