Emo de Medeiros is a Beninese artist living and working in Paris, France and in Cotonou, Benin. His work explores themes of transculturalism, transforming identities, post-colonial representations, and globalization as a worldwide hybridization and mutation. He also questions the African continent's transformations in the context of the digital revolution and the occurrence of a Pan-African 21st-century TransAfrica in transition between tradition and accelerated innovation.
Background and education
After spending his childhood and teenage years in Cotonou, Benin, he moved to France to pursue an academic education. He graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris where he studied history, sociology and anthropology, after which he continued his training at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts also in Paris. While in Beaux-arts he started focusing on digital arts: digital photography, graphic design, 3D modeling, digital video and interactive devices, and specifically explored the relationship between time and memory through the notion of instensity, linked to his experimental and electronic musical practice. After finishing art school he directed musical videos and experimental short films while pursuing his practice as a composer and producer of electronic music in Paris. He then moved to Boston, where he attended classes at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, before returning to France and finally to Benin.
Work
Emo de Medeiros' work crosses a variety of mediums, including photography, video, textile, painting, performance, and sculpture, and investigates themes of social and symbolic interactions, of the relationship to the digital civilization, of ethnicity and Panafricanism in a post-colonial context. He is sometimes associated with afrofuturism. His practice is based on the notion of contexture, defined as the creation of artefacts based on interconnections between cultures, materials, concepts techniques and practices from diverse areas, eras, and uses. In particular his pieces often mix technological elements and forms from classical African art, notably from Benin, or fuse art genres such as installation and performance resulting for instance in the notion of performative installation in which the public represents a semantic element in its own right, such as Kaleta/Kaleta presented in Palais de Tokyo in 2014. In 2015 he presented Pavillon du Bénin during the 56th Venice Biennale, a clandestine installation located next to the French Pavilion in the Giardini, the main site of the biennale. The ephemeral piece was an ironic political commentary about the clandestine African vendors figure's absence in the works presented at the biennale, despite their highly visible presence in touristic towns in Italy, about the economic and symbolic power balance that makes the presence of national pavilions of African countries difficult, and about the controversy regarding the Kenyan Pavilion where most of the artists presented were Chinese. His work has been shown in several solo and group shows in Benin, France, United Kingdom and South Africa. It was also presented at the Salon de Montrouge in 2013, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2014, at the Dakar Biennale and at the Arts in Marrakech International Biennale in 2016.
