Alice Diop has just returned to France from California when we speak. It’s a Zoom meeting with a bad connection, and Diop leans close to the camera, always in frame, barely moving. It’s like watching the characters in her documentaries and films, where her camera lingers on its subject with a slow, cool intensity.
Diop had been attending a two-week celebration of her work organised by the French department at University of California, Berkeley, in which academics pored over her documentaries (Nous (We), Vers La Tendresse (Towards Tenderness)) and her first feature film, Saint Omer, which received the Silver Lion in Venice in 2022. The courtroom drama was inspired by a real trial that Diop attended, of a Senegalese woman who had allowed her baby to drown in the sea. Over two hours, it explored the complexities of race, culture and motherhood in contemporary France.
The film was the first by a black female director to be entered by France as its official entry in the 2023 Academy Awards. But listening to them, it was good to feel understood.” As a film-maker, it’s also not her usual role to be putting on an exhibition. But today, we are here to discuss Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), a multipart installation involving film, artworks, readings, music and dance, soon to open in Paris, coinciding with the Art Basel fair.
Diop was invited by the Italian fashion house Miu Miu to create the five-day extravaganza, and is approaching it scene by scene, like a film director. Instead, it offered an opportunity to “bring together in one space, many of the women who work with me, who nourish me, who have helped me heal, and have together enabled this notion of consolation”. They include Marie Ndiaye, with whom she writes her films, the American poet Robin Coste Lewis, Chicagoan composer Angel Bat Dawid and historical figures such as Virginia Woolf.
The exhibition will open with a poignant image from the South African artist Zanele Muholi, of a woman looking at herself naked in the mirror. It closes with Simone Leigh’s sculpture Mami Wata, representing diasporic west African spirituality. But she’s never had a show in France.
This is an attempt to redress that.” This is the third year that Miu Miu has sponsored this exhibition, set to take place in the Palais d’Iéna, a modernist masterpiece from the early 1940s with an extraordinary 60m-long uninterrupted central hall. It’s where the house puts on its catwalk shows, and it applies the same no-expense-spared policy to the presentation of art. The first iteration in 2024, by the Polish artist Goshka Macuga, included a massive mechanical conveyor belt and a cast of about 100 actors.
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