Vita Nova departs from a mythical photograph of a cadet, used by Roland Barthes to dismount the imaginary of colonial imperialism, to create a spiral film in which History (Histoire), now chaotic in its temporality, returns in a more certain form as story (histoire). The found Time of history is here the survival to the image. It is the now, the temporality of the living, the untimeliness of the reciter.

Cuauhtémoc Medina: I hope viewers will agree with me that the opening of Vita Nova (2009) is a mesmerizing achievement. Issa Kaboré, one of the cadets depicted in the magazine Paris Match in 1955 as good colonial subjects saluting the French flag — an image that Roland Barthes took as his main object of analysis of the “Myth Today” in Mythologies (1957) — trying to sing “La Marseillaise” more than half a century later. In a brilliant, catastrophic way, the former cadet confuses the French hymn's call to the “children of the Fatherland” (“enfants de la patrie”) with a call to “the children of tyranny” (“enfants de la tyrannie”.) One is confronted with a momentous document: a slip of the tongue, caught on video, that suggests both the superficiality of state indoctrination and the rebellious character of the unconscious. How did you achieve that take? What were you expecting to get in asking him to sing?

Vincent Meessen: In 2006, I started my research in Ouagadougou by trying to locate the young cadet depicted on the cover of a 1955 Paris-Match issue or the two others featured in the inside article. To start with, I had only three first names and Ouagadougou as their presumed city of origin, nothing more. Before managing to find Issa Kaboré, I had to track him down through one-to-one meetings with other former colonial cadets. All of them had been trained during the same period in various cadet colleges set up by the French empire in several countries of Western Africa. One former cadet would lead me to the next. All were long retired and most of them had served as high-ranking officers in the army after decolonization. Each time I would film the interview and ask them to comment on this period of their life and their own memories. When I met Issa Kaboré, I brought him to a studio with another former colonial cadet in order to record a conversation between them. So that sequence of the slip of the tongue was recorded nearly by chance. In a conversation, I had asked him if he could sing the French anthem. He could not recall the lyrics but he would mostly hum them. I liked the idea that only the melody was remembered. But the slip of the tongue that happened was totally unexpected and left me speechless.

CM: All through the film you show contemporary young cadets fulfilling the rites of the religion of the State in Ivory Coast. Their patriotic maneuvers are all the more unsettling because they seem like a colonial inheritance. One feels that, although French rule is over, the very same ideological chains of signifiers have just been transferred to a mimetic form of domination. I was pretty disturbed by all these sights, for they felt like a weighty reproof of the failure of the concept of decolonization. Do you think these images carry another possible significance?

VM: By literally animating the Paris Match cover, I’ve tried to reinvigorate its critical potential. The actual drills filmed at the cadet school of Bingerville refer to military parades as paradigmatic rituals of state power, but also to the current subjugation of future African generations and consequently to the contextual difficulty for emergent dissonant voices. More generally, a second possible meaning could be that French rule is not over. “Françafrique” is a critical term used to summarize the ongoing neocolonial role played by France to preserve its colonial matrix of power in 25 countries or so of Francophone Africa. This expression is a distortion of the famous expression “France-Afrique” coined by Ivorian Félix Houphouët-Boigny. This anticolonial militant and unionist later became a French senator and then the first president of the independent Ivory Coast, a position he managed to occupy for more than 30 years.

CM: It is a bit of a paradox, but contemporary art is, to a great extent, a historiographical project. A significant number of works involving research are devoted to one aspect or another of the past, either in terms of art history, or the memorialization of modernity, or the exploration of archives of all kinds. I feel that Vita Nova stands above this trend both because it has a clear political relevance, in relation to calling attention to the centrality of colonialism in the formation of our culture, and because it goes beyond offering a merely archeological stance. You take the fact that Roland Barthes’ grandfather, Louis-Gustave Binger (1856-1936), was a key character of French imperialism in Western Africa, to unearth the convoluted relationship of critical writing and colonialism. In reality, most of the film offers an interpellation of Barthes’ legacy in the voice of Etienne Minoungou, an actor and theater director from Burkina Faso, which suggests to me something of a illumination on the kind of questions that postcolonial theorizing would need to involve in addressing intellectual history. Am I wrong in thinking that the film is an attempt to address the question of the future of critical thought, in terms of assuming itself to be properly postcolonial, in contrast to the neocolonial forms of both Western thought and the formation of the global state?

VM: Contemporary critical thought should at least be conscious that insofar as it is a construct of modern rationality, it cannot obscure its darker side: colonialism. The way the Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo has built upon Michel Foucault’s thought, and more precisely, the epistemological effects of colonialism, is not only useful, it's absolutely necessary in order to challenge Eurocentric perspectives. Decolonial conceptualization like Mignolo's is thus needed in order to articulate future critical narratives, since European perspectives remain by definition very partial. What is important to me is the rhetorical dimension of the narrative of modernity, and the impossibility of expressing future thoughts without performing mythographic operations. I think these operations, like Vita Nova, need to assume colonialism as a power matrix that has forever affected the subjectivities of both the colonized and the colonizers. One of the possible ways of escaping from the simplistic colonial dialectic is to focus on objects, signs, and documents in which reciprocal possession is still vivid. It's a way to grasp not only “the what” and “the how”, but also why Western modernity has decided to reject other sorts of affects and concepts, presumably felt as threats to its systemic differentiation principle. In my opinion, only research-based artistic practices offer the possibility of confronting not only the rational, but the sensible and transcultural dimensions demanded by these re-narrativizations.

CM: You have included Vita Nova in the setting of a more general project, My Last Life (2011-2013), that also includes an exhibition inspired by Marcel Broodthaers’ Un jardin d’hiver, which locates a significant number of documents and images related to Roland Barthes’ “African intellectual attic”, if you’ll allow me to call it that, in between palm plants and symbolically charged objects, along with a Fac Dissimile (2009-2013) of issue 326 of Paris Match which highlights the number of articles and images that related to colonial modernity and colonialism. As a former historian, I am humbled by the quantity and quality of your research, which culminates in a diagram on the wall, Cosmograph (Herbé, 2011) mapping all kinds of economic and cultural relationships between modern French literature and the French colonial project. How did you embark on this process of research? How different do you feel your work is from that of the humanities scholar?

VM: I think that not being a scholar means that you allow yourself to construct the conditions and parameters of your research. By not predefining the disciplinary limits of your research or the best-suited media for the foreseen artworks, you're able to let documents act as proper agents rather than just dead traces. Intuition is part of that constructivist methodology, but it's not sufficient, of course. One needs to be aware of the narrative dimension of criticism and problematize it within what Barthes would have called “third forms”: critiques that assume their enunciative and narrative dimension, and the other way round, stories as ideological carriers. Cosmograph, for example, is the savage reappropriation of a diagrammatic format used by genealogists. As a network, Cosmograph collects factual data from which to plot other possible storylines. It’s a speculative tool for factography, a word that in the future could potentially replace History.

Credits

Directed by Vincent Meessen

Based on the writings of Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

The reader: Etienne Minoungou
The 1955 troop cadet: Issa Kaboré
The 2009 troop cadet: Miessan Gnagny Hans Andersen Kehasey

Camera operator: Sebastien Koeppel
Sound Recordists: Alain Kempinaire, Gaston Mobio
Editor: John Pirard
Sound designers: Raf Enckels, Jan Van Hende
Location managers: Serge Ilboudo, Ablas Ouedraogo
Grip & Lighting: Thierry Kafando, Grégoire Simporé
Driver: Moussa Konaté
Archival researcher: Nahuel Montembault
Translations: Joris Vermeir, Etienne Van den Bergh, Maria Palacios Cruz
Subtitles: No problem, Openend

Executive production: Manivelle, Ouagadougou – BAC, Abidjan
Production facility: Graphoui, Brussels – Argos, Brussels

Archives: Ecpad, Ivry-sur-Seine – A. Zoungrana, Ouagadougou — Museé Senlecq, L’Isle-Adam
Filmed in: Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso – Bingerville, Ivory Coast – Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast – L’Isle-Adam, France

Producer: Normal, Brussels
Co-producer: 4th Contour Biennale for Moving Images, Mechelen

With the support of VAF, Flanders Audiovisual Fund

In memory of Diouf Birane and Sebastien Koeppel