Shivay La Multiple – À la recherche du fruit ligneux, aux confluences des eaux, 2024

Shivay La Multiple’s creations meld dream and reality. Their research focuses on devising and sculpting a coming-of-age story that begins in the Maroni River, then glides along the waters of the Congo, the Senegal, the Casamance and the Nile to the Itanda Falls in Uganda, the Douro in Portugal and the Lobe in Cameroon. There, the artist collects woody fruit: the calabash, a guardian of tradition, whose round shell holds water that would trickle away through human hands.

Shivay La Multiple is continuing with their project À la recherche du fruit ligneux, which they began in 2022. Back in Lyon, where they studied, the artist has set their research at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers. At the centre of the installation is a suspended stained-glass window, composed of a juxtaposition of emojis. Shivay La Multiple has created an iconography version 2.0, in which the mirror, with its reference to the myth of Narcissus, refers as much to the reflection in the water as to our digital habits and selfies. On the wall, the artist uses wallpaper as a bas-relief, adding sculptures, gourds and beads to form a frieze chronicling their research. The whole is a tribute to the river, a political and symbolic entity that nourishes and unites us.