Malala Andrialavidrazana

FIGURES
2015 - ongoing

Malala Andrialavidrazana’s Figures employs the potential of intersecting information and transforming support material. By associating diverse elements such as regional and world atlases, bank notes, and the album covers that marked her generation, Andrialavidrazana’s compositions reframe the knowledge we think we have of the world.

With this new series, the artist has adopted a manifestly different style, but her work remains highly personal and inspired by the notion of territory, which she has been exploring for several years. Through her deconstructions/reconstructions, she envisions cartography as a privileged means of conveying our current situation, one that is gripped by the phenomenon of globalization. The resulting creations are amplified by the presence of the engraved elements from the bank notes, symbols of the economic domination inherited from the colonial period which continues to endure even after the declarations of independence.

Figures questions the meaning of the signs and the representations within images. Above all, the exploration of these different maps, produced amid the great powers’ exploratory campaigns and conquests in the 19th century, exposes the unilateral nature of their conception. This needlework, this fabrication of new images orchestrated by the artist, illustrates her dexterity when composing perspectives. Malala Andrialavidrazana uproots, crops, photographs depending on the source documents she has chosen, then superimposes the images to reinforce her reflections on the circulation and uncertainty of knowledge. All of these clues subtly overlap in successive layers to give birth to photomontages, to imaginary worlds where the oceans come to life.

Text by Yves Chatap, Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2015
in 'Telling Time ‑ Rencontres de Bamako, 10ème édition'