Luna Mahoux

Luna Mahoux's work is a great archive made up of images, music and words. Her projects are built on the collection and transmission of personal and communal Black emotions, i.e. that which is shared by people within spaces or practices of resistance and self-definition that she met during her research travel in Chicago. She uses screenshots from YouTube videos, cell phones cameras as well as TikToks to fight against capitalist assimilative gluttony in a cybernetic world in which every move and sound as well as bodies producing them are instantly assimilated in new tropes. The contemporary hierarchy of images is based not only on sharpness, but most importantly on resolution: the more you see, the more you are seen. Drawing upon the economy of poor images, in reference to Hito Steyrel’s homonymous text, Luna considers low-res aesthetics as a tool to make the invisibilized communities visible again. How do you reclaim your own identity, when white poplar culture appropriates elements from Black culture? Against the cultural pathology of forgetting, Luna Mahoux’s works are interpreted as traces preserved in cybernetic strata of digitized meanings. What is unearthed must be more «real» and more «true» than all that was accumulated since then, to construct the present.