Banian

"With the project 'Banian', Marion Cevaer explores the erased history of New Caledonia. With the colonisation by France in the nineteenth-century, the South Pacific island was transformed into a penal colony. More than two thousand North-Africans, the majority of whom were colonised Algerian convicts, were shipped to New Caledonia, becoming colonists themselves after having served their sentences. A collective sense of shame led the settlers to erase their cultural roots for the sake of adaptation. Those settlers bore the first generation of children without roots.

'Banian' lays open a web of roots of Caledonian history in form of a pool of testimonies and memories of family, public figures, social scientists and other descendants of Algerian settlers in New Caledonia, which an audience can explore within an exhibition setting. 'Banian' proposes an immersive sensorial experience which centres around the rewriting of history from a decolonial perspective."