“It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name”: Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records

“It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name”: Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records

“It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name”: Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records

Student $7
General $10

Date
April 8, 2025, 7pm
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, April 8 at 7pm for an evening featuring Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records, presenting a performance by Jean-Baptiste, preceded by a screening of Under the Sky of Fetishes by Caroline Déodat. The program will conclude with a conversation between Jean-Baptiste, Yasmina Price, and LaCharles Ward about Black visual and sonic practices of refusal, historical counternarratives from the African diaspora, and Jean-Baptiste’s larger practice. This event accompanies the publication of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence

Film

Caroline Déodat, Sous le ciel des fétiches (Under the Sky of Fetishes) (2023, 17 minutes)
Under the Sky of Fetishes addresses the complexity of showing the omnipresence of colonial archives. The film reinvests the specters of a haunting gaze to tell the story of Mauritian sega—a dance and music practice born during the period of slavery within communities of fugitives. How to project—literally bring out of oneself—the narrative of the aggressor?

Performance

Approached through Jean-Baptiste’s experience in playing the role of an extra in a BBC adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, and enveloped by the eponymous song by Nina Simone, Jean-Baptiste’s performance interrogates Western colonial histories and the afterlives of slavery in the mind, body, and soul of Black people, through strategies of archival reenactment and embodied memory grounded in the experiences of the Guyanese and West Indian diasporas in France.

This program is co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility                
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.     
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.              
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

Category
Colonialism & Imperialism, Film, Performance
Subject
Diaspora, Black Studies

Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker who works between Brussels and Paris. He grew up in France, in the context of the Guyanese and West Indian diaspora. His film Listen to the Beat of Our Images (2021) was selected for ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, Sundance Film Festival, and IDFA, among others. His first feature film, Kouté vwa (2024), premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.

Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles. Her forthcoming essay, “Tongueless Whispers and Ritual Choreographies,” will appear in World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, later this year.

LaCharles Ward is Director of the Center for African American Media Arts and Museum Curator of photography and film at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming issue of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, appearing later this year.

Caroline Déodat is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Through her films and installations, she explores the spectral dimensions of the moving image, in between fiction and experimental ethnography. Obsessed with processes of archiving and alienation, history and myths of violence, Déodat seeks ways to recompose histories and weave silenced genealogies through the convocation of haunting memories, deferred archives, and oral images. Déodat has developed a style of poetic montage in her visual practice, where she pays particular attention to polyphony. Since 2019, she has been working on experimental films, in which she uses dance, archive, music and narration to create what she terms “oral images” that expose themselves to a multiplicity of audiences.

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