Capucine Vever

Dunking IslandCapucine Vever, 2021.

Text by Patrice Joly, artistic director of Zoo center d'art contemporain (Nantes), co-curator of the installation presented in Nantes from May 10 to September 21, 2025.

Dunking Island is a reflection on the threat to Senegal's coastline posed by the global phenomenon of rising sea levels. Comprising a multi-projection system and an acousmonium deployed on six video screens and twenty sound sources, Capucine Vever's installation takes over the generous volumes of the Chapelle de l'Oratoire, a major venue for video art in Nantes. The island featured in this story is none other than Gorée, whose name echoes echoes of the slave trade that, for decades, organized the massive transfer of people to the colonies as slave labor for the planters. The city of Nantes, which played an active part in this trade, has been revisiting this past for some thirty years, through various landmark events, the most emblematic of which was the Les anneaux de la mémoire exhibition in 1992. The artist's proposal is part of this memorial movement, which aims to shed light on the city's role in this industry that made the city's fortune in the ^17th century.

Dunking Island can also be understood as a slow immersion of the island, metaphorically referring to the devastating effects of the capitalocene and associated global warming. In striking contrast, Dunking Island alternates between shots of Lebou fishermen - an autonomous tribe already present before the arrival of the colonists - using traditional techniques, and those of the bows of factory ships ravaging the ocean floor. The underwater sequences make us aware of the scale of the plastic waste pollution that is transforming the coastline into a vast aquatic dustbin, where shimmering tropical fish are indifferent. Capucine Vever's film reveals the intensity of the damage to the island's shoreline caused by ever-increasing memorial tourism, which the country does not have the means to deal with, combined with dramatically rising sea levels. This growing damage is simply prolonging the effects of a globalized economy that dates back to the triangular trade boom.

With the planned sinking of Gorée, the disappearance of an irreplaceable island of memory is at stake. But the song that accompanies this filmic plunge into Atlantic waters is more an ode to the ocean than a victimizing pamphlet. Set to music by Valentin Ferré and carried by the voice of the great Senegalese singer Wasis Diop, from the Lébou people, infused with animist thought, Capucine Vever's film takes us on a modern odyssey where the recollection of ancient dramas rises to the surface of consciousness, mingling with the rumor of contemporary tragedies linked to migration. The resolutely slow pace of the video, in tune with the ebb and flow of the sea, brings us back to the ancient times that colonial fury has disrupted. Dunking Island cradles us in these interwoven narratives, where nostalgia is nowhere to be found, but where the graceful gestures of the fishermen, left to the fluctuating currents and moods of the ocean, simply stand out.