Eddy Firmin

gwoka

2022

Eddy Firmin is interested in the politics of knowledge sharing and the epistemic conflicts they engender in the colonized artist. He thus seeks to remedy the codes of an ancestral practice, the Gwoka (between dance, song, storytelling and music). The latter belongs to a humpbacked epistemology, i.e. to a very large family of Afro-Caribbean practices built to resist colonial violence (such as the Paracumbé, Guineo, Bélè, Calenda, Bomba, Tambú, etc.). This compelling need to transfer ancestral codes to recent visual mediums is due to the fact that my islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique have not produced a visual tradition to which I can refer because of the prohibitions of slavery on a restricted perimeter. Apart from resistance, one of the main codes of this practice is lokans. Specific to the singer/songwriter, its aim is to mask the resistance of the slaves under the finery of a plastic song driven by technical virtuosity. The lokans is then the shield of flowers behind which the war rumbles, because it is also the art of double language. Thus, my practice, among other codes, uses this one. Technicity and aesthetics aim to seduce, and the background discourse allied to other types of codes aim to resist the master discourses (in the arts, as well as in the social space). Originally from the French Caribbean (Guadeloupe), Eddy Firmin is an artist-researcher. He holds a doctorate in Arts Studies and Practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal [Canada] and a master’s degree from the visual art school of Le Havre-Rouen [France]. He is the publishing director of the decolonial magazine Minorit’Art. In his works, he questions the transcultural logics of his identity and the balance of forces at play in it. On a theoretical level, he is working on a Méthode Bossale, a proposal for the decolonization of the imaginary in art.