Glass panels form metal-framed screens, like large windows placed directly on the ground. On their surface, evanescent silhouettes, barely embedded foliage, and enigmatic lettering come together to whisper stories that have been silenced for too long.

These screens, which reveal as much as they obliterate, are one of the characteristic forms of Euridice Zaituna Kala’s practice. In 2020, they made a notable appearance in the exhibition ‘Je suis l’archive’ organized at Villa Vassilieff in Paris. For this project, Kala, a photographer by training, worked with the archive of Marc Vaux, who documented the art scene of Montparnasse in the 1920s and 1930s. Kala sought out references to figures that had a personal resonance: Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, or her father, archivist Getúlio Mario Kala. Faced with documentary gaps, she interprets and invents through a process she sometimes calls ‘affective archaeology.’ Black artists, poets, icons, and models make transitory appearances across the surface of the glass. Kala gives a voice to those who no longer have one, or never had one.

For her solo exhibition ‘Daylighting, mais c’est l’eau qui parle’ at La Criée in Rennes, Kala makes the buried presences of the city rustle: its enclosed river, its ancient seeds, its whispered stories, and its struggles. Her approach draws inspiration from the English expression ‘daylighting,’ which refers to the excavation of a watercourse that had been covered by urban infrastructure. Within a landscape-installation, the artist distills these elements into places from her personal history: Rennes is connected to New York, Maisons-Alfort, Maputo, and La Réunion. The space resonates with the intermingled voices of the artist, her mother, and her grandmother.

Kala thus seems to conduct excavations in the blurred zones of the past to exhume the unspoken and bring these erased parts of history to light. As in the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theory of the jaguar’s gaze, the artist reminds us of the importance of taking all perspectives into account.