Weeds

Marguerite Humeau’s Weeds is an online sound piece that rescues the names of women healers from past – and the ones who still exist hold knowledge that will disappear with them – , and who have made and continue to make a difference in their communities and in human history.
Weeds is a tribute to all the women healers who have existed on Earth since the beginning of humankind, and who have been omitted from official written histories and discourses. In Weeds, an immaterial entity, a woman’s voice scans the internet, looking for these women. Travelling through space and time, the piece is punctuated by hesitations and silences as the voice is confronted with the impossibility of her task. The list is composed of found names and speculative ones, as she attempts to fill the silences of History by drawing on her own imagination. The sound piece veers between funeral oration, homage, indictment and chant, revealing the names of muted voices and bringing their legitimacy and legacy into the central arena.

Marguerite Humeau carried out extensive research, going through archives and books, and scanning scientific, archaeological and anthropological papers and manuscripts, among other documents. A lot of these women healer’s names are difficult to locate because they are often known only by their first name or by the name of their community, husband or family. In this sense, Weeds is also an attempt to create an archive of these women, recited by the voice of the musician Lafawndah – a reminder that the knowledge of women healers is often disseminated by oral tradition, transmitted from generation to generation. Weeds (archive doomed to remain unfinished) highlights how many women have made such an important mark on History even though their names have not been recorded.

Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986, FR) lives and works in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011. She has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London; Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Nottingham Contemporary; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunstverein in Hamburg; Museion, Bolzano; and C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels. Her work has also featured in numerous group exhibitions at, among other places, the High Line, New York; Château de Versailles; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAMVP, Paris; Serpentine Galleries, London; Istanbul Biennial; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse.

Lafawndah‘s journey to her current incarnation as a devotional pop polymath has wound as unpredictably as her compositional style. The ceaseless artist returns with ‘The Fifth Season’, released in September 2020 on Parisian label Latency. In contrast to the precision-tuned industrial productions of debut album ‘Ancestor Boy’, her second album breathes a different kind of volatility, inviting a new degree of spontaneity into her process, as reflected in collaborations from live sessions with tubist Theon Cross from Sons of Kemet, trombonist Nathaniel Cross, percussionist Valentina Magaletti, Nick Weiss on keys and additional production, French rapper Lala &ce, and with visual artist Marguerite Humeau.

Europium is a Paris based Art/Creative Direction and Photography studio founded in 2020 by Designer Ghazaal Vojdani and Photographer Julia Andréone, exploring the potentials of image-making, creating original content through photography, as well as giving concrete form to concepts by way of design. Having shared a background at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London where they both studied Graphic Design (2010), they subsequently parted ways to further explore their independent practices as well as teaching, in New York and Paris. Julia received her MA in Art Direction and Photography from Écal in Lausanne (2014) and Ghazaal received her MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University School of Art in New Haven (2013). Europium is the confluence of their skills whilst working internationally with clients in the cultural sector including fashion, music, literature, fine arts, architec­­­ture, and design. Europium teaches Visual Direction and Image-Making at the MA program in Fashion Design at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris.