Lands – portrait de la ville de Houston
Emmanuelle Huynh
Jocelyn Cottencin
In 2023, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting Emmanuelle Huynh and Jocelyn Cottencin for the creation of Lands – portrait de la ville de Houston.
For the portrait of Houston, Emmanuelle Huynh and Jocelyn Cottencin chose a line of research on which Cottencin has worked for the past ten years: "la fin de la modernité" (the end of modernity). This concept has been developed by many anthropologists, including Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and John Baird Callicott.
This concept is associated with the idea of “relative universality,” meaning that Westerners have predominantly lived with a worldview oriented towards progress and exploitation, where nature is cast aside as an element of which we are not a part. This perspective stems from the 17th-century separation of natural sciences from other sciences and the humanities.
“The end of modernity” teaches us that worldviews are manifold and other existing societies see the world from a different, sometimes horizontal perspective. And that the notion of nature doesn’t exist for many of them because these societies integrate their “environment” into their relational network.
The city of Houston has a recent history, dating to the mid-19th century. But the land on which it was built has a much longer history. The history of the United States is similar to that of Europe but accelerated. Where Europe required centuries to construct cities and situations, the United States took a hundred years. The idea for this portrait is to interview a range of people of different origins, social classes and genders to tell and perform the city’s history from their perspectives, beliefs, their stories (Native American, Mexican American, African American, European American, etc.), based on three questions:
1. the story before the city was founded - Houston before Houston
2. the narrative of the city’s construction
3. the vision of the city today
This work focuses on the notion of plural histories of the land of Houston from the perspectives of different communities who have sometimes built antagonistic narratives about the construction of this city. Mexican Americans, European Americans, Indian Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, etc., have developed perceptions of this city that correspond to their histories, cultures, and beliefs.
Photo: Lands – portrait de la ville de Houston | Emmanuelle Huynh & Jocelyn Cottencin © Jocelyn Cottencin
About the artist
Emmanuelle Huynh
In 2023, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting Emmanuelle Huynh and Jocelyn Cottencin for the creation of Lands – portrait de la ville de Houston.
Jocelyn Cottencin
Artist and performer Jocelyn Cottencin uses a wide variety of media to question the place and status of signs: in the form of installations, films, performances or typographic creations, he explores the way images inhabit us. His work focuses on notions of community and group, and the end of modernity. Through numerous collaborations with artists from the choreographic field, his work exposes the shifting trace of signs and their impact on sensitive experience, as in the cycle of work devoted to the cities of New York, Saint-Nazaire, Sao Paulo and Houston, co-conceived with choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh.
Photo : © Jocelyn Cottencin
