Monika Emmanuelle Kazi: terrain meuble

Monika Emmanuelle Kazi’s terrain meuble transforms the Centre culturel suisse into an architecture shaped by domestic spaces, family memories and diasporic experience between Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo and Paris. A structure of mobile partition walls occupies the space, becoming surfaces for stories of childhood, family histories and broader narratives connected to colonial legacies, economic exchanges and the circulation of materials and resources.

The exhibition focuses on construction materials and the histories they carry. Cement, introduced in Africa during the colonial period for permanent construction, gradually replaces vernacular materials adapted to local climates. The condensation and marks that appear on cement walls are reinterpreted by Kazi as drawings and crystallisations of memory. Tropical woods exported to Europe return in her work as marquetry, revealing other movements of materials, value and history.

The title terrain meuble evokes mobility, instability and the humidity of a constantly changing ground. Mobile wooden panels form a shifting installation, marked by pyrography, sapele marquetry and fragments of wallpaper. Openings in the partitions reveal their structure and allow sand to pass through, creating an environment in which intimate and transcontinental memories remain in continuous transformation.