The Chevalme Sisters Hors-champ, 1

For several years, the Chevalme sisters have been creating a body of work centred around French colonial history that puts ‘archives to work (1)’. Conducted from a dual perspective - archival research and restoration-transposition of the archive through drawing - the project is halfway between scientific and artistic work, with drawing as its backbone. Producing images from colonial archives is not insignificant. Through this gesture, they restore them and bring them back to contemporary life, where a new narrative is reconstructed.

Their use of archival images creates a new iconographic space in which the past and the present merge, intertwine and collide, initiating narratives that are more representative of society, a kind of futuristic projection that is part of a decolonial practice of the image. The gold metallic powder drawings superimposed on the archival drawings create a new archive, forcing the archives to reveal their continuities with a globalised contemporary world, but above all to welcome new narratives.

(1): Archive(s), memory, art: interview with Anne Klein, Entre temps magazine, 2020