40mcube

Artists Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Arthur Gillet, Anna Holveck, and Marianne Mispelaëre each cultivate, in their own way, a distinctive and personal relationship with language, voice, speech, silence, and listening –elements they approach as political, social, and aesthetic materials. Through their artistic practices, they create spaces for speech, give voice to the unheard, and make the invisible visible, offering an artistic translation of these concerns. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, a visual artist, researcher, and editor from French Guiana, draws inspiration from the ecological and decolonial vision of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris (1). His film Limbé (2), exhibited in Les voix, refers to one of the poems by Léon-Gontran Damas, the Guianan poet and co-founder of the Négritude (3) movement. Limbé is also a performative Creole expression that activates the notion of limbo through speech. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc tries to shape this state through the recorded and silenced performance of the dancer and choreographer Betty Tchomanga, with whom he often collaborates. In this performance, he speaks about the death of his sister, which brought sorrow and deep melancholy, while echoing Wilson Harris ’ reflections on the Limbo dance. This dance may be a way to embody, through its contortions, the movements that enslaved people had to invent in order to survive the journey across the Atlantic aboard slave ships. Visual artist and singer, Anna Holveck explores through video, performance, and composition, the places of the voice inside the body in the space and in the image. She creates immersive listening situations, at the border between ear and mouth. Their processes, which reveal themselves gradually, involve both the one who makes the sound and the one who receives it. For the opening of the exhibition Les voix, Anna Holveck performs again Singin’in (4), a piece in which the voices of two lyrical singers disturb the identification of sound sources and create diegetic confusion. The video and sound installation À voix off (5) features a woman with motionless lips described by a narrative voice composed of a cut-up of voice-overs talking about women or addressing them, taken from a selection of Hollywood films from the 1950s (6). In these two works, the effects of synchronisation mirror the links that unite the body with the voice, and the sound with the space. The artist identifies these perceptual distortions as places of emancipation for the body and the listening. Since 2017, Marianne Mispelaëre has been interested in alternative modes of communication –corporeal, invisible, discreet…“where the narrative exists while words seem inappropriate.” With La Marseillaise, a work initiated between 2019 and 2022 as part of the New Patrons program with the Collège du Vieux Port in Marseille and thankyouforcoming as mediator structure (7), she collaborated with graphic and character designers So-Hyun Bae and Federico Parra Barrios to create a typography that allows French to be written using the alphabets of all the languages spoken by the pupils. Each of the thirty-eight phonemes of the French language is represented by a sign taken from one of the pupils’ languages, which can also produce a sound. To read this choral typography, multiple speakers of different languages must participate, each contributing their knowledge of pronunciation. Thus, the French language becomes a host, capable of welcoming, articulating, and allowing the coexistence of the languages that live within its territory. Arthur Gillet presents in the exhibition Les voix a work from the most autobiographical part of his practice. In 2025, he conducted a [LINK text='residency' href='https://www.40mcube.org/en/coda/'] in Rennes with the contemporary art centre 40mcube with various deaf audiences and CODA (Children of Deaf Adults). His deep knowledge of the deaf community (gained from growing up in Rennes) as well as his connections with numerous schools and associations that welcome and support this public, enrich his project. The 23-meter-long silk painting titled Tout ce dont vous n’avez jamais entendu parler ( All that you’ve never heard of ) (8), painted in a style reminiscent of the Italian Primitives, particularly Cristoforo de Predis, a 15th century deaf painter. The work depicts the shared histories of people with hearing impairments. Hence, the exhibition, which brings together the artworks and voices of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Arthur Gillet, Anna Holveck, and Marianne Mispelaëre, forms a polyphony. It invites us to listen carefully, to sharpen our perception, to see silence, to give shape to language, to enlighten or blur voices. It calls for respect for each voice –and for all the others. Anne Langlois