Thursday, August 4, 2016

The Necessity of French Cafés - Part 1

Exploring Lisa Diane Wedgeworth’s Acknowledgment of the Black body through Installation

By Sojourner Ahébée

On July 27, 2016, Paris’s Galerie Couteron transformed into a space for healing and freedom. None other than the brilliant Lisa Diane Wedgeworth exhibited a visual installation that served as powerful acknowledgment and memorial for the Black American body in France and in the United States.

Wedgeworth is an L.A. native who spent two months in Paris this summer as the 2016 Georgia Fee Artist-in-Residence. Inspired by the African-American legacy in Paris -- as the City of Light was a safe haven for many African-American artists and scholars, especially during the height of American racial violence in the 20th century -- she spent her time in the city exploring this history and the lives of contemporary Black-American expats living in Paris. Through a series of interviews with Black-American locals, writing workshops she organized for the expat community in Paris, as well as personal journal and blog entries she wrote detailing her experience here in Paris, she tirelessly worked to uncover some of the racial dynamics in the city that contributed to this sense of black liberation many Black-American expats have attested to over the years.

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth presents her installation
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée


Wedgeworth’s installation, entitled The Necessity of French Cafés, upheld and celebrated Black lives around the world with haunting intention and love. As you entered the gallery, you were greeted by a long line of white espresso cups and saucers that graced the wooden floor. Some cups were filled with coffee, some were only half filled, and still others held the brown residue of a dry coffee stain. During the opening reception, Wedgeworth informed us that each espresso cup represented every Black American killed while she was working in Paris during the months of June and July 2016.


Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée

Wedgeworth was quite intentional in her positioning of the cups. She provided her audience with a guide to interpret each cup, and by extension, each Black life and its own human positioning. In her Artist Statement, she writes, “ The varying levels of café in the cup represents whether the person was… non-threatening (full cup), unarmed and threatening (half-full cup), armed and threatening (residue), armed, threatening and committed a violent act or homicide (empty cup).” The direction in which the handle of each espresso cup faced also represented whether the person was unarmed (right facing) or armed (left facing).

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée


But the question becomes “Why the espresso cup as a metaphor for Black death?” The answer is actually grounded in the history of French café culture and the liberatory role it has played for the many African Americans who have ventured to Paris over the ages. The French café was and is often the place in which many Black-American expat communities -- from writers like James Baldwin to visual artists like Beauford Delaney -- met with each other in Paris to talk, to organize projects, to share stories, and to exist without the burden that their racial identity created for them back home. It was a space where the Black mind could find repose and joy.

Musician Tommie Lee McKenzie and dancer Samuel Mwamé
perform freedom songs during Wedgeworth’s installation
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée

Black Americans throughout the 20th century were often welcomed by the French, and this welcome certainly extended itself to the space of the French café. So when Wedgeworth asks us to imagine Black death in terms of espresso cups, she is essentially naming a kind of Black loss that functions in a trans-Atlantic mode of history. She is asking us to imagine the kind of freedom Baldwin and Delaney felt in the French café, and she demands that we envision what that freedom could have looked like if experienced by the now dead, Black-American citizens back home. Later in the evening she explained the following:

I was in London when I learned of the death of both Alton Sterling and Philando Castille and I began to wonder if they had had the opportunity to come to Paris, to learn and feel that their Black bodies were not on the radar of the Parisian police, would they have chosen to stay in Paris or some other part of France and still be alive today?

Many of the people I have met here will never return. The lives they are living, the freedom they feel will never be sacrificed for the illusion of dreaming in America.

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth explains her installation to audience
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée

But is there a certain illusion that also accompanies the supposed freedom Black-Americans feel in Paris today? Poet Langston Hughes once wrote of Paris and said “ There [Paris] you can be whatever you want. Totally yourself.” And Hughes’ sentiments and love for Paris were certainly replicated in generations of Black Americans who would, too, come to see Paris as a place where race did not dictate the way people treated you, your very life and death. and.

Yet, as a Black-American woman navigating the city throughout these past few weeks, I am constantly reminded that I am Black.

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth (left) with Sojourner Ahébée (right) at the installation
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée

Also, with the relatively recent emergence of African immigrants in the city and the complicated (and often violent) colonial history that informs the relationship between Africa and France, Blackness in Paris and the way Blackness is both perceived and received in the city,have been completely transformed. There is a significant sense of anti-immigrant sentiment present in the city. There is also a charged history between French-speaking Africa and France and this relationship most certainly serves as an explanation for the racism many Africans face in the city.

But, the big question is, how does this “new” African presence affect the reception of Black Americans in Paris? Is Paris still a refuge for Black Americans? Would Philando Castile and Alton Sterline have felt safe in Paris if they had traveled to the city?

Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
The Necessity of French Cafés
Galerie Couteron, 2016
Photography by Sojourner Ahébée


Sojourner Ahébée is a 2016 BOSP Continuation International Fellow for the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University. She is currently serving as the Paris intern for the Wells International Foundation.

Read more of Sojourner's work at Sojourner Ahébée.


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