UNDER THE SKIN

Video / photo installation

2017

It was in 1952 that Frantz Fanon analyzed in his work Black skin, white masks, the repercussions of colonialism on humans, and more precisely on "black man" and "white man". He addresses the representations that white men make of blacks and the inferiority complex cultivated by colonized man. For Fanon, himself of Caribbean origin and descendant of an old colonization, the white man will tend to see a black person as a "little negro", like a being below and who would have difficulty expressing himself in French. The black man would rather see white first as a haughty being abusing to provide for all the same classified as being "superior". Fanon explained in his book that when the Martinican ended up in the metropolis, he was transformed. He suddenly needed to prove himself and show the other "whites" that he knew how to express himself. Then, once back in Martinique, the one who wanted so much to prove that his color did not change his intelligence and his abilities, returned to transform into a haughty being. In this brief explanation, the author was able to reach the central points of my work. Without visual cues and with an almost identical intellectual background, is it still possible to make a distinction between two individuals of different ethnicities?