Clémence Lollia Hilaire

Clémence Lollia Hilaire (1995, Guadeloupe) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, whose practice often looks into processes in which a sense of self and belonging are constructed in the geographical and diasporic context of the (French) Caribbean. This manifests in the form of videos, sculptures and sometimes audio works that attempt to challenge the limits of purity and essentialism.

Clémence’s search for moments of ontological slippage and category transgression lead to crafting objects and narratives where records of personal experience loosely coexist with more than human and mythical protagonists.

In her moving image work The silt has risen from the ocean floor and overturned everything she documents Sargassum seaweeds, a type of invasive algae proliferating in the Atlantic Ocean as a direct consequence of global warming. The work explores their presence on Caribbean coasts impacting flora and fauna, economies and health of the populations.

She intends to make an analogy between this ecological crisis and Édouard Glissant’s poetic concept of Silt. Through his philosophical and poetic writing, the Silt appears as a residual matter coming from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and bringing centuries of sunken histories back to the surface of our times. The Silt is composed of matter sunken in the abyss during the Middle Passage and comes back as an unavoidable force, an agent of memory and a nutritive substance, one that comes back to the shore of the islands to feed the Caribbean with new dynamics, the dynamics of the Tout-Monde.

Clémence contextualises the figure of Silt in the ecological crisis we are experiencing nowadays in the Caribbean with the sargassum seaweeds. Far from being a new phenomenon, the seaweed’s first description can be found in Columbus travel diaries. In this work 3D rendered and DIY imageries help stress the ambiguous qualities of this transhistorical substance.

We first met Clémence while completing a research secondment in The Netherlands as part of Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange (SPACEX) a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE).