Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s video work Nou Voix (Our Voices, 2018) opens with a courtroom scene from the 1990 feature film Jean Galmot, aventurier, directed by Alain Maline. The original film by Maline dramatizes the real-life story of French “adventurer” Jean Galmot, who traveled to French Guiana in 1906 with the intention of exploiting a gold mine he had inherited. Galmot would remain in Guiana for the rest of his life and hold several political offices in the French colony up until his murder by poisoning in 1928. Unrest, caused by outrage over Galmot’s murder, ensued in the capital city of Cayenne. The scene from Jean Galmot, aventurier revisited at the beginning of Nou Voix shows the end of a 1931 trial held in Nantes, France, where fourteen Guianese (twelve men and two women), referred to as the insurgés or insurgents, who had been charged with looting and murdering fellow citizens in the aftermath of Galmot’s death, were acquitted.1The brief fragment of Maline’s film, which features Jean-Baptiste’s father Gilbert as an extra, shows the defendants jumping up from the benches where they sat, erupting in celebration at the verdict. This instant of celebration, however, is held in suspension by Jean-Baptiste. Digitally manipulating a degraded copy of the film, the artist disturbs the smooth, linear flow of the source material, stretching the jubilant outburst far beyond its original duration. Nou Voix shows a sequence of images that move forward only to freeze—or indeed to go backward—again, rendering the shot as a stunted and faltering succession of still images. Finally, the sequence is played out smoothly and at regular speed, but in reverse.The artist employs the same technique in Moune Ô (Oh People, 2022), which in many ways functions as a sequel or follow-up to Nou Voix. In Moune Ô, the object of Jean-Baptiste’s operations is footage from a “making of” television documentary on Jean Galmot, aventurier, also directed by Maline and released in 1990. More particularly, it is a shot showing a Guianese carnival parade organized on the occasion of the film’s Paris premiere. Again, Gilbert Jean-Baptiste makes a brief appearance; this time he is seen playing a percussion instrument in the parade. Like in Nou Voix, the original material is broken up into still images subsequently brought into choppy, convulsive movement—something I will refer to as an (im)mobilization of the existing footage by Maline. Like Nou Voix, Moune Ô appropriates and reworks existing media content for the purpose of decolonial critique, concerned as both works are with the historical and ongoing extraction of natural resources (especially gold) from Guiana. As Jean-Baptiste’s work intimates, the colonial exploitation of Guiana’s riches coincides with a deeply problematic representation of the Guianese—who are at once racialized and emphatically included as subjects of the republic in support of the notion that Guiana is indeed a French département d’outre mer (“overseas department”)—in the media.The focus of this text will be, first, on the formal treatment of the visual archival material featured in both Nou Voix and Moune Ô—on these works’ (im)mobilizations of Maline’s footage. Here, the aim will be to demonstrate that, far from being peripheral to the works’ subject matter, Jean-Baptiste’s particular manner of continuously interrupting and reanimating the temporal flow of the moving image material he works with is crucial to our understanding—and our feeling—of these works. Most immediately, it is a means for the artist to thwart the desire for diegetic development and frustrate expectations of easy visual pleasure—and, as such, to refuse the aforementioned problematic portrayal of the Guianese people (including his father) as both racialized and assimilated to the French state.In a manner less evident but no less important, it will be argued, Jean-Baptiste’s revision of both Jean Galmot, aventurier and the television footage of its opening night gestures toward the imbrications and codependencies of the temporalities of media, on the one hand, and the temporalities of history and historiography on the other. While media technologies are often seen as both a product of and a cipher for the Western and modernist ideology of (historical) progress, Nou Voix and Moune Ô suggest a rather different way of thinking and using media, and in doing so trouble an all-too-straightforwardly progressivist understanding of history. Informed as it is by colonialism and capitalist expansion, such an understanding would insist on the simple supercession of the old and “outmoded” by the new. As such, this view of history induces and legitimates a hierarchy of development that ignores or erases the coeval coexistence of multiple histories and temporalities in the present. By contrast, Jean-Baptiste’s work strives to show and make felt the co-presence and contemporaneity of different historical temporalities. As is mentioned in the work itself, Nou Voix is a reflection on how to “make a picture of the now,”2 understood as a complex confluence of different times and histories.Furthermore, in Nou Voix as well as in Moune Ô, the artist employs footage from the aforementioned sources with great economy, and approaches visuality as such with acute caution. Indeed, the “picture of the now” that both works present is only partly a visual one. Jean-Baptiste’s (im)mobilization of moving-image material in these pieces needs to be apprehended in relation to those passages where only a black screen is shown and primacy is given to the aural register—passages that, in fact, take up most of the screen time in both works. In Nou Voix, Gilbert Jean-Baptiste is heard reading out a poem consisting of a series of questions (including the one used in the title of this essay) that he and the artist co-wrote in French Guianese Creole. Translation is provided in both French and English through white subtitles appearing on the entirely darkened screen.Something similar can be observed for a brief while in Moune Ô, although generally this later work favors music over the spoken word. It opens to “Mouvement d’avion,” a 1922 harmonic choir composition by Edgard Nibul about the first plane landing in Guiana, which was also used in the opening scene of Jean Galmot, aventurier. It closes, finally, with the track from which it takes its name: “Moune Ô” by Josy Masse. Featured on Masse’s self-released album Fanm from 1984, the track “Moune Ô” fuses Guianese music with funk and jazz influences. Another aim of this essay will be to try to trace the intricate ways in which these sonic elements accompany and speak to (Jean-Baptiste’s use of) the visual source materials in both video pieces, further contributing to what will here be called an aesthetics of co-presence.Aesthetics, as the branch of Western philosophy initially dedicated to examining the nature of sensuous experience in general and subsequently specialized into a sphere for reflecting on culture and art in particular, has been the object of some due criticism in recent years. More specifically, it has come under scrutiny for its historical role in legitimizing the experiences of some as the basis of sound and valid knowledge, casting these experiences as the normative yardstick for “the human” as such, while at best disregarding forms of experience—and their attendant cultural forms—associated with other (with “other” basically meaning non-Western, non-white, non-masculine, and non-bourgeois) ways of being and relating in the world. As such, aesthetics and the brand of humanism that it inspires have been and are implicated in racialization, among other things.3These critiques of what Terry Eagleton has called the ideology of the aesthetic are absolutely crucial for any consideration of the aesthetic, and of aesthetics, today. However, it remains the case that the aesthetic, in the broad—and arguably the original—sense of the term, understood as “that hybrid form of cognition which can clarify the raw stuff of perception and historical practice, disclosing the inner structure of the concrete,” can effectively be mobilized against aesthetics and humanism in the currently dominant sense.4 As Kandice Chuh has argued, precisely “because of the role of aesthetics in securing the common sense of bourgeois liberal modernity, aesthetic inquiry provides entry to the apprehension of illiberal, uncommon sensibilities,” and provides a “procedure for calling into question the structures and processes of (e)valuation that subtend the sensus communis and the means by which sensibilities that differ and dissent from liberal common sense are brought to bear.”5This text therefore examines how both the visual and aural aspects of Jean-Baptiste’s video pieces afford an experience that rubs against the grain of such forms of putatively common sense—how they incite and foster uncommon sensibilities. More specifically, the aim of this essay is to try to make clear how Nou Voix and Moune Ô challenge all-too-commonsensical notions of historical time by providing a concrete sense of co-presence—of how the present moment, the now, is composed of multiple temporalities rather than structured exclusively and straightforwardly by linear progress.Nou Voix and Moune Ô are fractured into discrete images that are subsequently brought into a slow, spasmodic, and decidedly non-naturalistic form of movement—a form of movement that points to blockage, arrestation, and disruption, but that remains movement nonetheless. What will here be called Jean-Baptiste’s (im)mobilization of existing video content is one example and one instance of what Tina M. Campt has called “still-moving-images”—that is, “images that hover between still and moving images; animated still images, slowed or stilled images in motion or visual renderings that blur the distinctions between these multiple genres; images that require the labor of feeling with or through them.”6 As Campt suggests, work that “suspends the presumed distinction between still and moving images transforms our encounters with black visuality through the slowing and stilling of moving images, and the animation, aspiration and quite literal setting of still photographic images into paradoxical forms of motion.” As such, still-moving images enact a double-edged form of refusal in that they “say something about black visuality, and at the same time, they say something differently.”7 As will be shown, this is certainly true for Jean-Baptiste’s (im)mobilization of Maline’s footage.Equally, this (im)mobilization shares some characteristics with what Laura Mulvey has described as an “aesthetics of delay,” where “the image itself is frozen or subjected to repetition or return,” resulting in a “new stillness,” the significance of which “goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved.”8 Nou Voix and Moune Ô do indeed raise the problem of time by introducing stillness into the moving image (and vice versa), but they do so in a manner that is not entirely identical to Mulvey’s theorization. Writing at what she considers to be the historical conjuncture of the “death” of cinema and the ascendancy of digital media, Mulvey sees the aesthetics of delay as the outcome of efforts to establish a dialectical relationship between old and new media.Presuming that dialectics implies the unity of opposites in an eventual moment of synthesis, no such relationship is formed in these works by Jean-Baptiste. Rather than sublate or work through the tensions between old and new media, the (im)mobilized images in Nou Voix and Moune Ô emphatically retain elements of both. In so doing, they do not so much strive for a synthesis out of the original oppositionality (between “old” and “new”) as they cancel or call into question the very oppositionality that dialectic movement always presupposes and is animated by. As such, Jean-Baptiste’s work complicates the developmental logic that continues to structure and underpin Mulvey’s argument in the form of an elegiac master narrative concerning cinema’s redundance or death. While Mulvey stresses that what she calls “delayed cinema” acquires a political dimension through being “potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after,’” this political dimension is decidedly of the afterlife of cinema as a now-residual cultural form.9For both works, Jean-Baptiste sourced the original material from VHS tapes, the contents of which he transferred to DVD and then manipulated using digital editing tools. These different steps in the production process, involving different media technologies, are all emphatically visible in the end result; the unmistakeable wear and degradation of VHS is distinctly legible, but it is equally apparent that the particular interplay between stillness and motion would scarcely have been possible without video editing software. As such, Nou Voix and Moune Ô are not to be seen as exemplary of the tendency in contemporary art to fetishize media widely regarded as outmoded or obsolete—whether to homeopathically administer experiences of authenticity “seen to offer a reassuring escape from the instability and uncertainty of the rapidly changing present,”10 or to return spectators to a more expressly embodied form of perception by confronting them with forms of material “dropout and decay that correspond to our bodily mortality.”11Equally, it would be tempting, but ultimately not entirely appropriate, to describe the work in terms of media archaeology. For, while media archaeology is relevant to the extent that it differs from the “usual sublimated way of approaching science and technology through simple linear progress myths,” its unearthing and unpacking of media objects and artifacts that are understood to consist of historically sedimented layers to be excavated does not correspond with Jean-Baptiste’s work.12 In these pieces, the “old” and the “new” are very much brought together on the surface of the image; archaeology, whether understood as a metaphor or in the sense of Foucault’s methodology, does not fully apply here. In Nou Voix and Moune Ô, different temporalities are made experientially available simultaneously, in one and the same image, generating a certain tension without engendering mutual exclusivity. It is in this manner that Jean-Baptiste’s video pieces develop, in the visual register, an aesthetics of co-presence.This aesthetics of co-presence problematizes not only the distinction between old and new media, but also the overly and simplistically unidirectional or developmental view of history in general that supports this distinction. Beyond its opening scene, which I have described above, Nou Voix features two other scenes that are similarly (im)mobilized: the first shows a river flowing, the second the passage of a small crowd through the streets—with particular emphasis placed, through the editing, on close-ups of people’s footsteps. Both scenes can be read as visual metaphors for the linear progression of historical time—metaphors which are, however, complicated and corrupted by Jean-Baptiste’s manipulation of the footage.This conception of historical time as linear is of course strongly associated with Western modernity and is imposed on much of the rest of the world in a totalizing and often violent fashion. As Partha Chatterjee has pointed out, the “empty homogenous” time of capital and modernity, when it encounters an “impediment” or something that resists it, “thinks it has encountered another time—something out of pre-capital, something that belongs to the pre-modern,” and something that will therefore be understood as “coming out of humanity’s past, something people should have left behind but somehow haven’t.” As such, this understanding of time includes its own being understood “as an attribute of time itself,” legitimating the suppression of everything that is other to it.13Needless to say, this understanding of history and its entanglement with coloniality has been subject to scrutiny from many sides—including by thinkers who are from the West but operate in (partial) opposition to its dominant views.14 However, perhaps the most salient critique of this hegemonic view of history in relation to a reading of Jean-Baptiste’s work can be found in the work of poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant. While this critique in fact undergirds and is at work in all of Glissant’s theoretical-conceptual work, it arguably finds its most explicit articulation in an essay in Caribbean Discourse titled “The Quarrel with History.” There, Glissant writes that the idea of a universal and progressivist History (with a capital H) “is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone ‘made’ the history of the World.”15 Glissant asserts that, within the Western tradition, Marxism “used objective reality and its own viewpoint to criticize the concept of a linear and hierarchical History.” He adds that “[i]t is this hierarchical process that we deny in our own emergent historical consciousness, in its ruptures, its sudden emergence, its resistance to exploration.”16 Glissant points out that this emergent historical consciousness in the Caribbean is hampered not only by the erasure of collective memory, but at the same time, and perhaps more perniciously, by the fact that (colonial) history is still too forcefully present: because “history emerges at the edge of what we can tolerate, this emergence must be related immediately to the complicated web of events in our past. The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present.”17 And later: “[w]ould it be ridiculous to consider our lived history as a steadily advancing neurosis?”18Glissant’s critique resonates with Jean-Baptiste’s work, which is concerned with confronting colonial remnants and with attesting to how their intransigence is constitutive of a present that can only with deliberate imprecision be called postcolonial. His particular way of employing existing footage refuses and undoes the perception of mediation as a means for passively storing historical content, and engages audiovisual material to instigate memory as an active “act of commemoration—a process of recollecting or remembering.”19 Collapsing historical distance and eliminating in advance the possibility of monumentalization, memory conceived as an act and process is decidedly in and of the present. And the way it is evoked and enacted in Nou Voix and Moune Ô does share some structural qualities with what gets called neurotic, due to the restless and all but compulsive revisitation of the material cut and stretched, chopped and screwed, impeding a reparative working through and withholding promises of wholesomeness or redemption. Needless to say, this is not a matter of psychology (of individuation, of interiority), but of the articulation of an artistic strategy, an aesthetic form, adequate to the challenge of addressing and expressing the obstinate, fraught, and often painful persistence of a past that cannot be relegated to history both because it is constantly conjured up through memory and because it extends into the present.Memory, in these two video pieces by Jean-Baptiste, is an emphatically embodied and affective operation. This much is clear from the poetic text that, as noted, makes up most of Nou Voix and mostly plays out against the backdrop of a completely darkened screen. The text, which starts out in the first-person singular, is initially silent—though, as in most of the piece, background noises of running water, wind, and animal cries can be heard. Then, after poetically alluding to how Maline’s film has covered and buried the voices of the insurgés, Jean-Baptiste stages a reversal of the trial scene in Jean Galmot, aventurier. In the 1990 French film, the insurgés—and the extras playing them, including Gilbert Jean-Baptiste—are seen but not heard, whereas Nou Voix does not show the artist’s father, instead letting its viewers listen to him speak in Creole. And while the purpose of the Nantes trial, as in any trial, was to close and settle the affair, the lyricism of Gilbert’s speech will serve to destabilize and unsettle, to assert that the case is not closed. Subtitles are provided which, beyond making accessible the content to a non-Creole-speaking audience through reading, also have the effect of underlining the discrepancy between the official French and the words spoken and heard in the video, thus directing attention to their pronunciation, intonation, timbre, rhythm, and pitch—to their phonic materiality in excess of their “meanings” in the more strict, logocentric sense.As mentioned, Moune Ô focuses on music more than on the poetics of speech, even though (the voice of) Gilbert Jean-Baptiste again makes a brief appearance in this work as well. Another key difference, perhaps, is that in comparison to its predecessor, Moune Ô is somewhat more expressly essayistic in its thrust. The 2022 work is more explicit in its endeavor to establish connections between the history and the present of colonial relations of exploitation. After the (im)mobilized footage of the carnival parade shown at the beginning of the video piece, Jean-Baptiste shows a shot from the beginning of Jean Galmot, aventurier. The audience is shown the Mana river, which, as the subtitles to the video explain, is crossed by the main characters of the 1990 film—and, by extension, by the real Jean Galmot upon whose life the film was based—in their quest for gold. Not much later, it is made clear that this quest is by no means over when the subtitles state, “Right here, in this moment, they are trying to drill a hole in this land to create the world’s largest gold mine: the Montagne d’or project.” The video goes on to point to the devastating ecological consequences this project will have: “The water that you see here, it won’t have the same colour then, you won’t be able to drink it, it will burn your skin.” Finally, at the very end of the video, these issues on the macro level of political economy are brought back to the sphere of the intimate and the personal when the first-person authorial voice in the video reminisces about the gold tooth that would become visible whenever Gilbert Jean-Baptiste smiled.Moune Ô is also more emphatic about establishing a parallel between the extraction of raw materials (gold) on the one hand, and the problematic representation by the Guianese—whose image is appropriated and reproduced—on the other. At the beginning of Jean-Baptiste’s 2022 work, it is argued that Jean Galmot, aventurier is also a product developed by “new adventurers,” meaning directors “who come from France, armed with their cameras, and redo everything, burn everything, reconstruct everything, capture everything, for the film.” Again, the silence of the Guianese as represented in the original footage constitutes the point of contention, as becomes clear when the subtitles to Moune Ô state: “Our bodies seem to have been used in this film, like puppets, like wordless beings, like extras.” It is this injustice that the supplementarity of Masse’s music vis-à-vis the visual material employed by Jean-Baptiste will not necessarily remedy, but certainly dislodge.Before moving on to the role this music plays in the work, it is worth noting that the many cuts and connections that Moune Ô makes from historical to present-day practices of exploitation point toward the continuous character and the ongoingness of so-called primitive accumulation. As Brenna Bhandar has noted, such primitive accumulation “requires a panoply of premodern and modern property logics that operate in conjunction with one another, reflecting the fragmented and contradictory nature of colonial modernity.”20 As Vittorio Morfino and Peter D. Thomas have written, already in Marx’s Capital, the chapter on primitive accumulation intimates the appearance of many temporalities in the present. The recursive violence of primitive accumulation is not simply cast as “a univocal directional indicator of a process of transition from one society to another,” and as such “does not represent simply the archaic—a residue of the past condemned to die—but a temporal stratum that is present and active.”21 Again, these theories of so-called primitive accumulation boil down to a matter of different temporalities coiling together to compose the present moment and, as such, correspond with an aesthetics of co-presence.Like the poetry spoken by the artist’s father in both works, the music in Moune Ô develops this aesthetics in a different register, and in a different direction, than does Jean-Baptiste’s (im)mobilization of Maline’s footage. The relative displacement of attention away from the visual, in both of the artist’s videos, corresponds to a turn in scholarship—especially in Black studies—toward the aural, upsetting the modern hegemony of ocularcentrism in general and the way in which optical visuality is habitually bent toward various form of domination (including racialization) in particular. Writing about Afro-diasporic musics and their intertwinement with the emergence of the phonograph as a medium, Alexander G. Weheliye traces and constructs a historical techno-aesthetics that is in no way reducible to a narrative of universal, continuous, and linear development—but that also, significantly, cannot simply be cast as outside of, or “other” to, Western modernity.22Looking at the “node of black cultural practices and sound technologies,” Weheliye examines how blackness, in music and in general, operates “paradoxically as both central to and outside of Western modernity,” which, he stresses, it is also a product of.23 Weheliye’s is therefore not a rejection of modernity as such, but a thinking thatdisrupts and displaces the grand narratives of reason and technological progress by incorporating those who fall outside of these categories in the mix, which disruption, in turn, revamps the meanings of modernity as it resists separating these two spheres (modernity and minority cultures) into neatly distinct categories, asking us to rethink the very source of this putatively universal and homogenous sphere.24Music is not just fundamental to this thinking, but is itself a modality of this thinking. The practice of music and the experience of listening to it, Weheliye writes, offers and yields “hypotheses of time not encased by the constraints of linearity and unimpeded progress in their incorporation of the active production of temporality,” hypotheses that “conjure a different form of temporal materiality, in which the material is interrupted and in constant flux rather than held in the abyss of universal time.”25In other words, Weheliye characterizes Afro-diasporic music(s) as antithetical yet fundamental—as external yet immanent—to modernity, on account of how they sidestep the binary opposition between continuity and rupture, between tradition and innovation, and between the old and the new. It is worth mentioning that, in so doing, his work is both congruent with and an extension of earlier discussions of these forms of music, including, for instance, Amiri Baraka’s (publishing in 1966 as LeRoi Jones) theorization of both 1960s commercial R&B and the experimental jazz of the period as “the changing same.”26 Equally it resonates with the work of Sylvia Wynter, for whom, as Katherine McKittrick has written, “the invention of black music is a revolutionary act that keeps heretical (nonmarket) time, negates black nonbeing by honoring and recoding black life, repurposes and interrupts linear temporalities, and is expressed in the midst of a violent and stigmatizing knowledge system.”27McKittrick is here elaborating on a claim, developed in Wynter’s unfinished book project Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, that the “subversive quality of black popular music has been primarily in its assault on this [dominant, universalizing] sense of time, its freeing of time from a market process, in its insistence on time as a life process,” and therefore on “qualitative rather than quantitative time.”28And so indeed it is when, at the end of Moune Ô, the eponymous track fades in to accompany the carnival parade footage (im)mobilized by the artist. Masse’s “Moune Ô” instantiates what Weheliye writes about, in how it both contains and is contained in existing musical traditions, while also evading the folkloristic. Heard first in “Moune Ô” are the elements that will remain continuous throughout the song: its simple and steady beat (with the snare drum hitting only on the four), and the choir of bellowing voices haunting its bass register, ceaselessly chanting moune ô in its every measure. These parts, repeated all throughout, at once ground the track and drive it forward, sustaining and providing sustenance for Masse’s vocals, heavy on vibrato, the funky staccato guitar work, and the saxophone solo that joins in at the same time as its syncopated piano backing.The (im)mobilized carnival images, which approach the aesthetics of co-presence negatively (that is, through a critique of Maline’s work enacted through that work’s deformation), are here joined by music that carries in itself a multiplicity of histories and temporalities, joyously instantiated and evoked in the present moment of musical performance—even if recorded. As mentioned, promises of wholesomeness or redemption are explicitly withheld in these two works by Jean-Baptiste, but that does not mean that there cannot, at the same time, be celebration. It is impossible not to see in the end of Moune Ô a kind of dance—a choreography that stages the coming-together of different temporalities and rhythms, that corrupts yet doubles down on cinema’s potential to fill, enrich, and ultimately undo empty homogenous time with the uncontainably plural temporalities generated out of gestures, actions, and movements themselves.At the same time, and in the same time: the aesthetics of co-presence involves not just contemporaneousness, but also a certain easing of contradictions and a learning to savor the contiguity of the music and the misery, the bitter and the sweet. “The taste and smell of music messes up the very idea of the liberatory as well as its before and after.”29 Music—some music—also teaches that, beyond reconciliation, assimilation, or compromise, the co-presence and convergence of different times can also take the form of a gloriously generative friction—of a groove. Which, perhaps, is one provisional answer to the questions raised at the end of Nou Voix:What does it mean to make a picture of the now?What does it mean to be together, here, now?
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Jan 2, 2024
Mabrouka M’Barek 
Open Access