Angels with dirty faces

Narrator: Octavio Framboa

Curator: Olivier Marboeuf

"You see me as an angel, because of my voice, but an angel with a dirty face. It is due to my song that you know I am a creature, like you, a man. But the most miserable man. Because you saw me diving to the bottom, putting up no resistance. Some even heard my laughter even though they all believed I died in a hole. But it was to disappear and come back, on the summit of all ruins, to be the loud ghost that pisses on the very last lights of the West."

Those are the narrator Octavio Framboa’s words, in Angels with Dirty Faces (song), the first of a series of meditations dedicated to the body’s struggle in a context of crisis. This narrative exhibition associates a music sheet with texts through which one can experience the vital power of a plaint. A distant echo of blues music. A musical genre whose purpose is an expanding rebellion. The sound of a bottleneck guitar, shrill and out of tune, the infra-bass dub of Thatcher’s England, the blurred frequencies of oceanic voices. A re-enactment of history, a geography that seeps through unknown voices that take the Atlantic Ocean as one would the oldest earthly suburb.

Travel, travel. Here, you won’t find any new hands to hold your face.

Olivier Marboeuf, a critic, curator and performer, has run Khiasma, an art center dedicated to moving images and contemporary literature since 2004. With this first exhibition at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, he goes on with his interest for narrative processes, considering the ways in which art can be read as a transmitter. Setting out new ways of reading contemporary history and especially colonial issues, his work (texts, performances and exhibitions) comes together in a vast speculative narration in which characters appear and links are created between scholarly or popular culture.