Laura Henno. M’Tsamboro

About

After her exhibition, which attracted attention, at the latest edition of the Rencontres d’Arles, Laura Henno is presenting at the gallery all her work produced in the Comoros.

As a continuation of her projects created in Réunion, in 2009 Laura Henno began working in the neighbouring archipelago of the Comoros, the regional epicentre of migration and its related repercussions. Although until then she had focused on the representation of young people implicated in “marronage,” referring to the act of runaway slaves escaping from slavery, which is now again used to describe the fleeing strategies of migrants, here she looks at the landscape of migration and the lives of people smugglers. M’Tsamboro, the title of the new exhibition at the Galerie filles du calvaire, thus refers to a small uninhabited islet of the Comoros archipelago where unscrupulous people smugglers leave migrants they have tricked and who were hoping to arrive in Mayotte. This insular trap then becomes the place of the first disillusions for these exiled natives of the Comoros, obliged to hide from the border police and their dogs. Through several new pieces and the film Koropa, which has received many prizes, M’Tsamboro multiplies the perspectives on this territory full of contrasts, both illusory and very real, rendered in a poetic realism, but never idealised.

The M’Tsamboro installation, a triptych projected onto a single screen, places the visitor in front of the intersecting destinies of several children from the same family, who the artist has been following for four years, all of whom have trained to be people smugglers. At the helm of their small boats, they are brought back to a childlike innocence (noticeable by the decalomania of one, the satchel of another, and their pink customised paddles), which they nevertheless are on the way to losing. Frozen in a heroic posture (Eli backlit and bathed in a halo of light) or, on the contrary, confronted by the harsh realities of the job (Nasser ill, Mokatir with swollen feet), they embody the tragic condition of a humanity adrift, exposed to all risks and dangers. Placed in the opposite direction to the boat’s trajectory, in silence, the spectator witnesses the infinite wandering of these young driver-guides who seem to constantly return to their departure point. Freed from the narrative form, Laura Henno’s images here lend themselves with even greater ease to a game of interpretations: the children may be training or playing the role of prisoners unable to escape from the island, the doubt in their eyes recalls unattainable horizons, here symbolised by the islet of M’Tsamboro, which appears in the background, floating and unstable. This piece can be appreciated in direct continuity with the film Koropa, which depicted the passing on of people smuggling work between Ben and twelve-year-old Patron, whose point of view the current work adopts. Although the terse form sets up a certain distance, the frontal framing openly conveys the violence of the situation, that of a child who is made to grow up too fast and to take illegal routes where he risks his life.