Artists in residence

Keywa Henri owin Kalin’a taniabolin mokoma.

Kolomo owin Kalin’a tɨgaledalɨ abɨnyin nɨmbo mokoma, Beaux Arts de Lyon bo, 2022 ta.

Keywa Henri, born in Kaulu (Kourou) in French Guiana, is of French and Brazilian nationality. The first Kalin’a Tɨlewuyu artist (an indigenous people of French Guiana) to graduate from the Beaux-Arts de Lyon, she obtained her DNSEP in 2022. She is developing her practice in the field of animation, while at the same time thinking about the lives and histories of the Original Peoples of Abya Yala (“Americas”).

Multidisciplinary, she collaborates with Sioduhi, a Piratapuya fashion designer (indigenous to Brazil), on the Pamɨri 23 (2021) and Manioqueen (2022-23) collections, for which she directs the fashion films. She participates in the creative direction and supports Sioduhi Studio in the artistic direction of the brand. With production studio Caddah Studio

, she is directing Pamɨri 23’s second fashion film “Imanências” for Brasil Eco Fashion Week in 2021. She will also co-direct the Manioqueen show at Brasil Eco Fashion Week in 2022, as well as the Manioqueen show at Amazon Poranga Fashion in 2023.
She was part of the decoration team for Laurène Fernandez’s stop motion film “Les humains sont cons quand ils s’empilent” (Humans are stupid when they pile up), which won 3rd prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.
With a view to perfecting her technique, she began a training course offered by the English animation studio Aardman Animation, Ltd. and is currently continuing to make her films.

Keywa sees animation as a language of transformation. A flow in which various elements meet and intertwine, giving rise to composite and ephemeral systems. The eclecticism characteristic of this form of expression leads him to develop protean projects drawing on materials that engage with his preoccupations.

Drawing on her life experience, she uses the movement to explore aesthetic, identity, social and political issues. It engages an indigenous and decolonial perspective that tends to confront the oppressive and dominant functions established within society.

Fuelled by her encounter with Jaider Esbell (1979-2021), a Makuxi (Brazilian indigenous) artist and thinker, during the “Paths of Contemporary Indigenous Art” workshop held in 2020, she questions the protagonisation of Original Peoples within the current general framework and works towards an indigenous empowerment.

VISUAL ARTS
INSTALLATION + PERFORMANCE

Collaboration and non-traditional art locations have motivated his artistic investigations throughout the past years. Amongst others, he realised projects together with colleagues from other artistic fields, botanists and other research organisations.

He realised projects outside traditional exhibition circuits like a 12-hour performance on a highway, a sensory deprivation tank type installation in a public park’s compost or an underwater architecture in the Baltic Sea.

For his show at galerie l’inlassable (Paris), he invited the audience to go for a walk where they become listeners of the viewer who walked the same path before. The walk leads us to the question of how