The first solo show by Christelle Oyiri, “Gentle Battle,” examines the French decolonization of Côte d’Ivoire and the opposition of the West African diaspora to the French state in the Paris banlieues. Oyiri, of Ivorian and Guadeloupean ancestry, currently resides in Paris and is known as Crystallmess. The coupé-décalé and logobi music she performs at Tramway is a thrilling complement to the DJ sets she does in Abidjan, Berlin, and Paris.
Oyiri takes the white gatekeepers of house and electronic music out of West African music genres to construct Black sonic ecosystems. The lead character of Oyiri’s movie War! Club! Action! (2022) is Douk Saga, also known as Stéphane Doukouré. Before asking us to sing!’ with Saga and his fashionable entourage, Oyiri introduces the pseudonymous and fake native informant DJ Eminence Grise.
According to Grise, “Coupédécalé is both a way of life and a slogan. Enjoy the pearls and nectar of life in and out of the clubs between Paris and Abidjan, and treat life as your theatre.
In the early 2000s, Saga made coupé-décalé, which is nouchi, an Ivorian-French creole that means “cheat and run away,” popular. Ivorians who lived through the 2002 Ivorian military takeover were exposed to the soft techniques of this dance music and the nearby genre, logobi, in Paris and Abidjan.
Archival video of the last coup d’état in 1999 is shown as War! Club! Action! Comes to a close, tying Saga’s rhythms to the republic’s violence. In another location, Vindicta (2022) is a collection of Kru ethnic masks engraved into mirror panels that reflect the observer.
The enormous foam Tusk of Zegui (2022), decked in gold leaf after the underwater erosion of its edifice, the red silk four-poster bed of Warrior Rest/Sleep Paralysis (2022) with golden braids, the splendidly fetishistic tribute to French composer Bernard Szajner in Sum Deaths Take 4Eva (2022), the three-meter folding screen, 2002 (2022), with images of Oyiri’s family, some of whom were
The exhibition “Gentle Battle,” organized by Simon Gérard, Claire Jackson, and Alexander Storey Gordon, wonderfully captures the involuntary sex and colonial yearning of the 20th century. In the breathtaking movie Collective Amnesia (2018–22), Oyiri says it best: “Suppress the lineage to the point it becomes a kink.” In another scene from the movie, R&B singer Helma Mayissa strolls daydreamily in front of a sizable fresco by Pierre-Henri Ducos de la Haille that hangs in Paris’ Palais de la Porte Dorée and shows topics of the French Empire. The painting, first created for the Paris International Colonial Exposition in 1931, illustrates how many non-white French ‘citizens’ were denied rights and asks whether conditions have changed almost 100 years since it was created.
A mass of fake Central African Francs (CFA) appears to have fallen from the sky underneath the screen (Lahan!, 2022). This currency is a “recipe for underdevelopment,” according to economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, who wrote in Jacobin in 2020, since it compels Côte d’Ivoire to keep reserves in the French Treasury, a neo-colonial bureau de change. In Collective Amnesia, Saga distributes 10,000 CFA banknotes to clubgoers as a celebratory gesture, and I grab one of the notes with the word “CRIME” inscribed on its surface. As Oyiri stated to Dazed in 2018: “The celebration of an uninhibited Africanness in the very sacred French public space,” there is also a video of young males performing the logobi.
