Never broken again

Her gaze diving into the blue light of her screen, Luna Mahoux has scoured the internet and social networks since her teenage years in search of genealogical ties to the Black diaspora. From windows to tabs, the artist curates Black visual content, which she integrates into her ever-expanding collection of moving images. 

In this extensive archive of live performance images, interviews with celebrities, random moments and scenes in the lives of strangers, Luna Mahoux cuts, separates, recontextualises and superimposes image, music and sound. From logobi and images of running athletes to wedding footage, Luna Mahoux produces a sensitive – and sometimes critical – discourse on popular culture from the 2000s onwards, revisiting the idea of kinship and addressing the issue of police violence. She sets out a series of actions that (re-)assemble, that repair the rips and tears. She allows fragments to speak for themselves and fills the moments of silence with music, images or her own words. Cutting, separating, superimposing, recontextualising: all these practices mark the artist’s (de)construction of her Black identity and denote the emotional relationship that links her personal history to that of the diaspora. Through the artist’s lighted windows, we are seeing diasporic friction and abrasion re-enacted. Figures with dark eyes hold each other and brush against each other as they dance, mothers embrace each other in mourning, lovers hug impulsively, all to “make visible memories and create potential narratives”. By drawing on the everyday, the artist’s images—which record the “magical power” that social media images and Google Maps searches secrete—subtly add to the technological, (oceanic) blue and fluid Afro-diasporic imagination.

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Text by Caroline Honorien

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