Do You Believe in Ghosts?

“Não mexe comigo, que eu não ando só” – Maria Bethania

(Don’t quarrel with me, I don’t want to walk alone)

“A spectre doesn’t just turn tables, it turns heads” – Jacques Derrida.

The clear questioning that serves as the title of the 24th Prix Ricard was borrowed from Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance, with Pascale Ogier in the title role and an appearance by Jacques Derrida in his own role. The scene is a mise en scène: a student asks a professor if he believes in ghosts. Derrida’s lengthy reply turns the hypothesis that ghosts – or the experience of ghosts – are attached to a bygone historical period or a pre-modern obscurantist milieu on its head. Shortly after this cinematic adventure, Derrida embarked on a critical rehabilitation of the ghost, which gave rise to his famous book Spectres de Marx (1994) and other texts and interviews. His work is constantly cited as the catalyst for what some Western researchers defined in the late 1990s as the “spectral turn”, i.e. the moment when ghosts, or specters, cease to be perceived as obscurantist figures and instead arouse awareness, as bearers of a specific ethical and political potential. As an analytical tool, the ghost inevitably interrupts the presence of the present; its liminal position between visibility and invisibility, life and death, materiality and immateriality, makes it impossible to approach anything as an isolated fact, or, to put it bluntly, to walk alone.

To evoke ghosts as conceptual metaphors in Paris in 2023 is also to recognize that these phenomena are culturally specific. Non-Western contexts produce considerably different epistemologies and critical potentialities when it comes to spectrality. Living with ghosts differs from ghosting, or the subject’s experience of social erasure, since haunting is one of the ways in which abusive systems of power make themselves known, and whose impacts reverberate in everyday life, particularly when they are supposed to be over (as with colonial invasions and transatlantic slavery, for example).

What unites the group of artists selected to participate in this edition is their disagreement with univocal interpretations or simplified representations of today’s present. Their work points differently to that which is formally absent but which, in a way, asserts its presence. The essence of a ghost – or any good work of art, for that matter – is that it claims its due and draws your attention. Our aim here is not to exorcise or solve any problem, but rather to talk about ghosts and learn to live with them, to (re)imagine the present and future through them. Living with ghosts also means realizing that beneath the surface of history with a capital H lies another narrative, made up of many unspoken and erased stories. As philosopher Avery Gordon puts it, to adopt a perspective other than the authorized and official one, and to write stories that deal with exclusions and invisibilities, is to write ghost stories. In this sense, the long process unfolding through this exhibition, presented in September, could be seen as a collective ghost story.

So far, we’ve learned that everything proceeds from the assumption that the same world (one among others, as the Mexican Zapatistas1 remind us) in which secularized historical time has been forged must inevitably coexist with and recognize its spectres. Even when it mutates into a conceptual metaphor, the ghost remains an unruly figure. It is never stable, because nothing is. The works in the exhibition are all new. At this stage of the project, like ghosts, they inhabit a form of latency, a liminal state. Some ideas have endured since the first collective and individual meetings, others have already been transformed. Certain themes, forms and subjects have been evoked, but nothing is yet definitive and perhaps never will be: vulnerability, invasiveness, hospitality, erasure, self-defense, urban and ethereal spaces are just some of the conceptual guidelines I defined during my meetings with the artists. Film, painting, mixed media and sound pieces form the production checklist.

In an interview, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman declared: “I’m absolutely incapable of defining things. So I go around them. I write around the film, around the hole, let’s say, or around the void. Because I want to make a documentary without knowing what I’m doing. People always ask me: “Tell us what you’re going to do”. And all I can say is that I don’t know. It’s precisely because of this lack of knowledge that there can be a film. I refer to these words when I think of group exhibitions. Throughout my practice, I’ve tried to connect the elements – human and non-human – that make up an exhibition in a way that is both socially meaningful and artistically experimental. In other words, I’ve tried to facilitate situations where individual elements, like the whole, are defined in terms of relationships rather than imposed by a curator. I’m wary of the concept of the exhibition as an explanatory space, when there’s more strangeness at stake. A way of discovering, with the public, how this confluence of forms and ideas will behave and where it will take us. In this sense, the opening of an exhibition could mark the beginning of a curatorial idea, not its end.

In the words of Avery Gordon, haunting situations emerge when home becomes unfamiliar, when the experience of linear time is suspended, when your bearings in the world lose north, when what was in your blind field is made visible. In this sense, I could argue that we’re trying to show a haunting situation in the exhibition space. Far beyond the awarding of a prize, the most important part of this project is that all its participants – both the public and those involved in its realization – are mutually influenced, affected and even altered by the ghosts released by the encounter of these six great artists.

Fernanda Brenner, curator of the ^24th Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize

Group show with the participation of Ethan Assouline