Mathieu Abonnenc

Secteur IX B

Secteur IX B is full of ghosts: some that you can see, briefly appearing at the turn of a statue in an under construction museum, some that you only dream of when you switch from day to night, of one space to another. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc invites us to follow a main character, Betty, an ethnographer currently leading research in the archives of the Theodore Monod Museum for African Arts, in Dakar. Punctuated by an anguished soundtrack and borrowing tropes from thriller genre films to create a sense of oddity, the film comments on the contemporary effects of colonial legacy in cultural institutions. The work also dives into Betty’s psyche, as she finds herself stuck in the nightmares that the artefacts, the images, and the museum seem to produce: It’s like I am wandering around in Leiris’ unconscious, she says. And indeed, Michel Leiris, the 20th century French ethnologist and writer, is the ghost that haunts this story. His words open the film, he is the voice-over that guides us through it, and his description of old medicines’ impacts on colonial explorers inspired this piece. Discussing the condition of the production of images and knowledge by western ethnographers, artists, and scientists, our hero induces the same mental state by taking the drugs these explorers ingested to experience their psychotropic effects. Engaged in a similar process as his character, Abonnenc emphasizes the subjectivity of researchers and reminds us that objects are powerful tools that can convey very different narratives depending on the context in which they are displayed and used.