SoundPortrait
The people keeping Paris dancing at 6am
They book hundred-capacity rooms, do not live off music, and hold up the Paris electronic scene on their own. Three nights with the collectives refusing to choose between rigour and joy.
Marilyse
IdeasEssay
The diaspora is not a backdrop
She is asked to explain her origins in every interview. She would rather talk about her work. On being assigned an identity in cultural circles.
Nadia K.1 min
There is a question put to artists from the diaspora and never to anyone else: where are you really from?
The compliment that assigns
We call it curiosity, sometimes appreciation. More often it is a polite way of reminding someone they are a guest rather than at home. The mechanism works all the better for presenting itself as kindness.
Being visible and being understood are two different things. The first is negotiated, the second is earned.
What assignment produces
An artist reduced to their origin ends up making what is expected of them, or making work against that expectation. Either way they are no longer working freely: they are answering.
Leaving the dilemma
There is no individual solution to a collective problem. There are newsrooms that change their questions, institutions that change their commissions, and media that decide to discuss the work before the trajectory. That is this section wager.
Read next
