Across the Souvenirs is a video-performance that opens with the excerpt “Déambulation,” showing the artist walking slowly with a bag in each hand. In “Expansion,” her image is mirrored and doubled as she performs within the audience space rather than on the stage, highlighting the relationship between social presence and memory. In “Transcription,” she and her double traverse the frame, drawing a white line on a black wall and erasing it with water from the bags, leaving only an ephemeral trace that evokes the intertwining of personal and collective histories.

“My work exists within an intermediary zone, a sort of matter space of a frontier I have produced and that I situate within the countries of France and the Democratic Republic of Congo.I am a cultural hybrid endowed with a composite identity.The plurality of my parents provide me with the authorization to interrogate my own history and that of a nation, the place of my birth, as well as the continent of Africa at large.The relationship that I maintain with my own personal history or histories and to history as a larger entity permits me to formulate a critical acquisition to write the concept of exitism. Exitism is a representation that is largely shared with history and even with practices at times. As the material of my work is always simple. I use historical facts that I interpret through the prediction of scene. Through these frontal images I expose my body that I use as a metaphor for the relationship between the human being and the world at large. My work sets up a direct relationship that centered on the world the field of society and politics.”

Excerpts from Global Feminisms: Michèle Magema 2010