Calchi facciale, 2023
Plaster sculpture with steel and wood
45h x 47w x 32d cm
In
Calchi facciale, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a key actor in the
establishment of the Code noir which defined conditions of slavery in the
French colonial empire, bears an anthropological facial cast. The work
references the justifications for colonial expropriation laid out through the
invention of “racial sciences” in Europe, running in parallel to the affirmation
of a genealogy traced to Greek and Roman antiquity in the development of European
Humanism —which cloaked under its ideology of universalism the reality of the
exclusion of most of humanity from its protections and rights.