Olivier Marboeuf - Film Production Politics: Polyphonic Witnessing and Emancipation

Starting from his speculative essay ‘towards a de-speaking cinema (a carribean hypothesis)’ Olivier Marboeuf inquiries about the representation of subaltern voices and their place in film. At which point does the call to speak up, to witness inequalities and to emancipate serve a neo-colonial purpose of reappropriation and exploitation of black bodies? How can a cinema of ‘productive refusal’ be a motor to reimagine cinema structures and creates ‘living commons’ inspired from the perspective of marginalized voices? How to project a choreography for a cinema that ‘de-speaks’ – a cinema of excess, of polyphony or cacophony – a cinema which flees from the oppressive relations in which the cinema system has placed those on the peripheries of cultural hegemony? How to move from cinematic representation as a mere metaphor towards an emancipated way of practicing life? What are the roles of producers, filmmakers, festivals, institutions and funding bodies within this dynamic?

Theoretical arguments in this lecture will be interpuncted by concrete examples and projections of excerpts from the film Ouvertures (2020) by The Living and the Dead Ensemble on which Olivier Marboeuf has acted as co-author, co-director and co-producer for Spectre Productions. There will be ample place for an open conversation with the audience.

Olivier Marboeuf is an author-storyteller, artist, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the early 1990s, together with French-Beninese author Yvan Alagbé, he founded éditions Amok (now Frémok), a research-based comics publisher that launched the legendary Parisian literary café Autarcic Comix. He then became artistic director of Espace Khiasma (2004 to 2018), a visual arts and living literature center based in the parisian outskirts and dedicated to minority representations, which contributed to introducing postcolonial theories to the French art scene through numerous exhibitions and encounters. From 2013 to 2024, he was also a film producer with Spectre Productions, producing some sixty artists’ films and documentaries from Ismaïl Bahri, Ana Vaz, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Maxena Yehouessi, Filipa César (amongst others). Marboeuf is a member of the cinema and performance collective The Living and The Dead Ensemble. He currently divides his time between writing, drawing and activities linked to collaborative art practices. He is a founding member of the Réseau Indépendant des Travailleur-euses et Acteur-ices de l’Art (RITAA) in Guadeloupe, member of RAYO, an experimental pedagogy program in the Greater Caribbean, and of the international board of the Akademie der Künste der Welt de Cologne.Among his recent grants and residencies, for the academic year 2023/2024 he has benefited from the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship at the University Institute of London in Paris (ULIP), where he initiated research about the archive of Caribbean diasporic presences in Paris and London. He is also writer in residence at La Maison Baldwin / Fondation Camargo in Cassis in 2025.

In 2022, he published the essay Suites Décoloniales : s’enfuir de la plantation and the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, both published with Éditions du Commun. In 2025, his theatrical text La nuit juste avant le feu will be published by Editions Atlantiques déchaînés.

Gawan Fagard is a film scholar and writer focusing on notions of film community and empathy in cinema. He’s co-founder of Cinemaximiliaan and currently a lecturer at Université libre de Bruxelles and RITCS School of Arts where he is teaching philosophy and cultural theory.This public event takes place in the framework of the seminar ‘Philosophical Questions’ in BA3 Audiovisual & Dramatic Arts at RITCS.