During Trouble, Performance Festival, Brenda Bikoko will take part in the panel 'Reflective moment: Vases communicants' on Friday 18 April 2025 from 9:30 until 13:30. The reflective moment Communicating Vessels brings together specialists in performance, Caribbean rituals, mixed-race women, intersectionality, contemporary artists and theorists, and cyborg mothers.
The panelists’ presentations and discussions with the audience will take inspiration from the figure of Cuban-American performer Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) and the notion of intersectionality, flowing into Annabel Guérédrat’s performance Let’s Go Back to the River, scheduled for the following day at Studio Thor.
Introduced and moderated by Véronique Danneels, the panel will open with the intersectional feminist approach developed by Anaëlle Prêtre, who proposes using it as a tool in the study of the arts to develop a methodology that makes women and intersectionally identified individuals more visible. Choreographer, dancer, performer, artistic director, and founder of Artincidence (Martinique), Annabel Guérédrat will specifically address her two performances programmed in the Trouble Festival. Carole Laurent will respond by discussing the political, aesthetic, ritual, and textual aspects of artist Ana Mendieta, referenced in one of Guérédrat’s performances. Meanwhile, Brenda Bikoko will introduce us to the creative spheres of other mixed-race performance artists. Before opening the floor to the audience for questions, Alessandra Benedicty will conclude this reflective moment by introducing the spiritual contexts of revered figures in the Black Atlantic, while demonstrating how Caribbean and Western intellectuals and creatives work to share this crossroads/intersection with their audiences.
Practical info
Languages: English and French, with simultaneous translation.
Free entry, reservation required. The reflective moment will be followed by a meal (€15 fee, reservation required).
Annabel Guérédrat in the festival: Mamisargassa 5.0 (17.04) and Let’s Go Back to the River (19.04)
In collaboration with Amazone. With the support of the French Embassy, as part of EXTRA, a program for the support and promotion of contemporary French creation in Belgium.
About the panelists
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (she, her) is a professor at the University of Amsterdam and teaches Caribbean and postcolonial literatures at City College of NY. She is the author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015) and co-editor of Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (2016) and The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (2016). Born in Italy, she lives and works in the Netherlands.
Brenda Bikoko (she, her) is a PhD candidate at VUB. Her research focuses on “How to recognize femininity in the works of female artists: appropriating colonial, imperial, and historical discourse and archives from the 1990s to today, in relation to Western Europe.” She is also a member of the Troubled Archives collective and a professor at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, where she teaches Congolese art studies and art anthropology.
Véronique Danneels is a feminist doctor of art history and archaeology. She has worked in museums, associations and the arts for four decades and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tournai for ten years. She now lives and learns in Vallgorguina, Spain.
Annabel Guérédrat (she, her) is an artistic director, choreographer, dancer, and performer. Founder of Artincidence, she explores the political body of Black and mixed-race women in the Caribbean through engaged performances. In 2017, she co-founded the International Performance Art Festival in Martinique.
Carole Laurent (she, her) is an art historian, sociologist, FNRS aspirant, and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at ULB. Her doctoral thesis is titled: Gunpowder & Sugar Politics: Ana Mendieta’s New York and Rome Years (1978–1985).
Anaëlle Prêtre (she, her) holds a doctorate in art history. Her research focuses on video art, representation, gender issues, and intersectionality. She is an exhibition curator at Centre culturel Jacques Franck and a lecturer at ULB.