Décolonisation à Paris, Metz et Vantoux

The article

In the “Coups de cœur” of its issue 191 (May-June 2025), Artension publishes a double page by Emmanuel Daydé entitled “Décolonisation à Paris, Metz et Vantoux”. The critic discusses Après la fin. Cartes pour un autre avenir, Manuel Borja-Villel's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, then Paris noir. Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950-2000 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

He then presents Barthélémy Toguo, a figure of contemporary Black Paris, who takes over Jean Prouvé's former prefabricated school in Vantoux: submerged jars, verdigris bronze catfish, abyssal anglerfish painted in midnight blue, ceramic octopuses. The school's portholes open, he writes, not onto the countryside but onto the depths of the Nautilus, and the artist speaks of a system in which nature and humankind regulate each other.

The text also mentions a comparison that collectors in Toulouse are said to have drawn with the work of Daniel Coulet, only to dismiss it at once: the author sees it as a confusion of two opposing worlds. The right-hand page reproduces a photograph of Barthélémy Toguo in front of his assemblage Road to Exile in Vantoux.