Installation "L’œil miroir"

Venezuelan artist Anabell Guerrero lives and works in Paris since 1986. Her activity, essentially photographic, has for a long time been concerned with themes related to mankind, borders and migration, exile, identities, and life between two worlds. Starting with her work about women from the Guajira region (Tótems, 2001), through the realistic approach of her serrated framing of bodily details of refugees from every origin piling into the Red Cross center in Sangatte, France (currently closed), Guerrero has not wavered in her effort to show, with great humanism, situations that are at once singular and universal, and which the passage of time ineluctably erases from our memory. Her heightened sensibility, combined with a profound cultural and social awareness, drove her to work with immigrant populations in France, in the context of several public commissions, especially in 2006 with Voix du Monde (Voz del Mundo), in Evry (south of Paris) and in 2002 with Aux Frontières (En las Fronteras), about Sangatte, commissioned by the Paris-based Parliament of Writers. Her Mémoire Obscure (Memoria Oscura), from 2010, explores the connections the artist has establish over the years with several Caribbean nations (Cuba, Martinique, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela), ethnically mixed nations that share a common element in their past: slavery.

Guerrero's most recent sculpture-installation in the Antilles comes in response (with six other Caribbean artists) to an international call for projects directed by Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as part of a drive for renewal in the region. Launched in 2010 by the Regional Park of Martinique, the project for the Greater Saint-Pierre (in the northern part of the island) is intended as the execution of broad urban-reordering plans associated with cultural-valorization projects. The first actions were carried out in 2011, in particular a study for the inclusion of Saint –Pierre as one of UNESCO's World Heritage sites and the rehabilitation of its old Botanical Garden. The public-art project, launched in 2002 with the seven artists selected, is part of this general framework.

Anabell Guerrero's installation, L'œil miroir ("The Mirror-Eye"), brings forth the collective memory of the Caribbean Antilles and of local populations in the city of Saint-Pierre. Its exceptional location between the national highway and the ocean, facing the Monte Pele volcano, provides a combined view of the city and the sea. Comprised of three triptychs and nine totems in mahogany wood, six meters tall, separated from one another to allow visitors to amble around, the installation is articulates around two inescapable dates: 1848, with the abolition of slavery, and 1902, with the terrible volcano eruption that destroyed Saint-Pierre; to these, the artist adds the current moment. Each totem is different. They carry one or several small round surfaces, sort of "eyes" (mirrored or transparent glass, photographs of the sky, fragments engraved with the poetry of the great poets of masticate and negritude, Eduard Glissando and Aimee Cesar, etc.) that look upon and interrogate us. In this way, the eye is a reflection, a mirror, a prism, or a double of the observer. It crystallizes a consciousness of history and makes it possible to imagine a present that is traversed both by the past and by our dreams.