Sala10: Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette
virtual exhibition
Mwen pa priye Zacca [I Don’t Pray to Zacca]
Besides being an artist and activist, Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette is also a poet, a sociologist and a dancer. Her Antillean background is constitutive of her artistic practice, which draws on different disciplines and media to confront the persistence of the colonial wound in Black bodies. Dance and performance have a central place in her ritual approach to this titanic undertaking. In Mwen pa priye Zacca [I Don’t Pray to Zacca], Melyon-Reinette offers her own interpretation of a dance of abundance on a banana plantation on her native island of Guadeloupe, France, invoking a reconnection between the Black body and the land.
Chlordecone: Or, the Sad Refrain as an Anecdote
Toward the end of our conversation, Meylon-Reinette tells me that Black painters in Guadeloupe and Martinique almost never painted the sea. In previous generations, Black people in these latitudes not only never represented it, but never even went near it. Only the French had the privilege of contemplating it as a landscape and not the scene of the colonial crime of the slave trade.
The global anxiety over the ecological crisis has led the West to look to traditional non-Western cultures in order to harvest their knowledge of relationships with the natural world that are based on reciprocity instead of exploitation. As tends to happen, this knowledge is translated into romanticized, universalized formulas that lack the complexity and profundity they had in their original contexts. But what happens when the land and the sea constitute the apparatus that has historically executed your death sentence? As the beaches erode, they uncover the remains of those who died along the way.
This problematic relationship with the land has profound roots in the centuries of slavery, but its most deadly and traumatic episode occurred at the end of the last century and its effects are ongoing. From 1973 to 1993, the French used the pesticide chlordecone, which is highly toxic to humans and banned in most countries, in the banana plantations of the Antilles. This poisoning of the land and water, which will last for 700 years, spread across the island and has affected all the animals and vegetables for human consumption.
It has been detected in the majority of the population of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which have the highest prostate cancer rates in the world.[1] France has acknowledged the harm done to the men who worked on these plantations, but they have never accepted that the islands’ extremely high rates of infertility, endometriosis and uterine cancer were a consequence of their poisoning of the harvest, even though women also participated in the sowing process. When they tried to bring about another trial, a judge dismissed the case.
When the artist returned to Guadeloupe, there was a highly active social mobilization around this issue and so her practice began to center the implications of this slow death. She has found an ally in the color blue, which is associated with the agricultural spirit Zacca Loa in the Haitian Voodoo pantheon. Loa (lwa in Kreyol) means spirit. The title of this video performance—Mwen pa priye Zacca [I Don’t Pray to Zacca], —makes reference to the Black body’s complicated relationship with agriculture and the land as a site of colonial violence. The survival instinct of the African diaspora has led them to stay as far from these monocrop fields as they can.
The artist seeks to reappropriate a place—in this case, a banana plantation—as a therapeutic, artistic and ritual act that conjures up a new relationship with this territory, emancipated from the colonial wounds that still persist in the island’s complex economic, political and social relationship with France (for example, 90% of the economy remains in the hands of the same French families that controlled the colonial slave system).
In the video, she is dressed in blue, the bags protecting the bananas are blue and her dance partner is also blue: a glass bottle she found in a flea market that has accompanied her throughout her performances and her life. Melyon-Reinette considers it to be a memory receptable that must continuously be filled. Her relationship with this object involves a flow of energy that comes and goes as she feeds it and feeds off it.
Likewise, her dance is accompanied by boulagyèl, a vocal percussion technique, and by a mélopée, a sad refrain that announces in Kreyol: Lanmizè pa dous, misery is not sweet. And yet we are pregnant with freedom, she tells us, quoting the poet Assata Shakur.[2] The hypnotic rhythm and cadence of her dance alleviates the identity crisis that arises when a nationality is bestowed as the result of a colonization process that uproots people from their connection with the land. Reclaiming this connection is an exercise in self-determination, a declaration of independence from the colonial specters haunting the Black body.
Alejandra Labastida
[1] Tim Whewell, “‘Primero nos esclavizaron y luego nos envenenaron’: las islas del Caribe que sufren las consecuencias de un pesticida cancerígeno,” BBC News, November 23, 2020. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-55030540
[2] Assata Shakur, “Love,” in Assata: An Autobiography, Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books, 1987, p. 130.
Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette
Mwen pa priye Zacca (I Don’t Pray to Zacca)
Video
05'18"
This piece is one of the winners of the 2025-2026 #Sala10 Competition
Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette (Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1981)
An artist and activist, poetry was one of her earliest forms of expression. Her first poetry collection, Les Bleus de l'existence (2009), was based on her early writings under the pseudonym Nèfta Poetry, as she was known in the slam poetry world when she performed alongside the singer-songwriter Gerald Toto (Melt in Motherland). She has published two other poetry collections: Ombres (Éditions Persée, 2011) and Mousmée – diario de una mujer orquídea (2013–trilingual edition, self-published). In 2016, she founded the dance company ANAMNESIS-K with the goal of “going in search of memory.” Her current scientific and performance practices intertwine, converse, combine and engage in mutual explorations. Her artistic practice is multidisciplinary, encompassing dance/performance, cinematographic performance, drawing and poetry, and has recently culminated in the four-month ArtsIceland Residency (2024), divided between Maison des Écritures in La Rochelle and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her video performance Mwen Pa Priye Zacca was exhibited at the Dakar Biennale as part of the international showcase curated by Salimata Diop. She also presented her live performance KEPONE INDIGO on November 8, 2024; she would create a video adaptation of this performance for the 2024 Festival International d’Art Video in Casablanca. She is the founder of the festival YABISI SERIES • Cri de Femmes, which she has curated for fourteen years.
Text: Alejandra Labastida
Curatorial Coordination: M. S. Yániz
Digital Management: Ana Cristina Sol Sañudo
Content Editing: Melinna Guerrero, Roberto Barajas
English Translation: Julianna Neuhouser
