“It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name”: Maxime Jean-Baptiste

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, April 8 at 7pm for an evening featuring Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records, presenting a screening of Moune Ô (2022) and a performance by Jean-Baptiste. The program will conclude with a conversation between Jean-Baptiste, Yasmina Price, and LaCharles Ward about Black visual and sonic practices of refusal, historical counternarratives from the African diaspora, and Jean-Baptiste’s larger practice. This event accompanies the publication of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence.

Film

Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Moune-Ô (2022, 17 minutes)
Largely made using archival material shot on a VHS camcorder in 1990s French Guiana, this film allows for the reworking and reclaiming of a specific moment—a celebration after the screening of the film Jean Galmot, Aventurier (Alain Maline, 1990). Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s father and many other locals appeared in the film, co-opted into a narrative that served French discourse around their colonial presence in South America.

The footage originates from a contemporaneous documentary as Maxime Jean-Baptiste reflects on the context of the making of Maline’s film. Images are slowed down and the glitch in the pixelated VHS material becomes more visible, allowing for new questions to arise from the archival material. The original moment is reconsidered through a post-colonial lens. (Courtesy of Open City Film Festival)

Performance

Approached through Jean-Baptiste’s experience in playing the role of an extra in a BBC adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, and enveloped by the eponymous song by Nina Simone, this performance interrogates Western colonial histories and the afterlives of slavery in the mind, body, and soul of Black people, through strategies of archival reenactment and embodied memory grounded in the experiences of the Guyanese and West Indian diasporas in France.

This program is co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History.

Bios

Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker who works between Brussels and Paris. He grew up in France, in the context of the Guyanese and West Indian diaspora. His film Listen to the Beat of Our Images (2021) was selected for ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, Sundance Film Festival, and IDFA, among others. His first feature film, Kouté vwa (2024), premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.

Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles. Her forthcoming essay, “Tongueless Whispers and Ritual Choreographies,” will appear in World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, later this year.

LaCharles Ward is Director of the Center for African American Media Arts and Museum Curator of photography and film at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming issue of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, appearing later this year.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

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