Castélie Yalombo Lilonge

'Does my body belong to me?' This is the question Castélie Yalombo Lilonge asks. She sees histories projected on it that she hasn’t lived but resemble her. Forms of the people of the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa, and Europe appear to her and then vanish. Between phantom and incarnation, she stands among them, navigating blended waters in an open ship filled with slippery identities. 

Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives is a performance that aims to express a mixed poetic in which the concepts of (un-)belonging and identity are regularly infused with the tension of double meanings, by the multiplicity of layers of being. This poetic traces the course of water in the complex mesh of personal and official history and, more generally, traces a way of being in the duality inherent to modern thought.  

Yalombo visits narratives, memories, territories where her body is played out, as if suspended between the gaze of the spectators and her own subjectivity. Her body, this object that reveals, despite herself, stories of domination, displacement, exile, and hope. The ceramics installation and sound scape intervene as partners on the stage, ensuring the torrential resonance of the fragile and violent magma of identity.   

• Castélie Yalombo Lilonge, is a Spanish-Belgian-Congolese artist, born and living in Brussels. Her artistic practice is situated at the intersection of choreography, installation, and poetic speech and questions the status of collective identity, otherness, and relationships, as well as the subject/object status of the body