PRINCES
Installation
Film
Stone Boys
Les Mornes, le Feu
The Third Island
Study for a Shell on Concrete
Postcard, Rear View
Palm I
INSULAR
Poems
Publications
Exhibition Views
Reviews
Writings
Commissioned
About
contact
PRINCES
Installation
Film
Stone Boys
Les Mornes, le Feu
The Third Island
Study for a Shell on Concrete
Postcard, Rear View
Palm I
INSULAR
Poems
Publications
Exhibition Views
Reviews
Writings
Commissioned
About
contact
Photo series, Chromogenic prints, various sizes
«INSULAR by Cédrine Scheidig explores questions of belonging, displacement, and home. Through the lens of the African diasporic gaze, the images capture a sense of connection to a new place, while still maintaining a sense of belonging to the places they were born and grew up in. This project seeks to document the lives of African diaspora people in Malta, and to create an archive that celebrates their identity and presence in this new land.»
Exhibition text, INSULAR, Spazzju Kreattiv, 2023
INSULAR is a photographic project that focuses on the everyday life and destiny of young men from the African diaspora, recently settled on the island of Malta. Proposing a sensitive portrait of this new community, it captures moments, places and faces extracted from their daily lives, in an attempt to re- create a sense of home, a home in the making. The story is created through wandering, long term encounters, and an intimate look at the people and spaces photographed. Behind all the geographical backgrounds and identity variations of the newcomers emerges a relative unity, the need to acquire a power to signify, to invent singular, liberated forms of existence, and, for the photographer, to elaborate the figure of an afro-european political subject. By proposing reflections on insularity and cultural hybridization, both embodied in the symbolic process of the passage, she weaves, with the help of her narrative approach and the color palette that infuses her work and her scenographic expression, links between the history of contemporary migrations in the Mediterranea and another history of passage, much older, between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, that is deeply rooted in her own personal identity. Inspired by the Franco-Caribbean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant and his reflections on creolity, cultural hybridity and the Whole-World, the photographer attempts to produce renewed visual universes in order to activate in her photography what Glissant called for: «The need, of course, to support political and social struggles where we are, but also [...] The need to open the imagination of each person to something different, that is to say that we will not change the situation of people in the world if we do not change this imagination.»
This project has received the support of Spazju Kreattiv, the French Embassy in Malta and Alliance Francaise de Malte-Méditerranée.
The British Journal of Photography | Link to Publication
The Eyes | Link to Publication