For the 20th National Slavery, Slave-trade and Abolition Commemoration Day, the Villèle historical Museum is taking part in the #Patrimoines Déchainés campaign launched by the Foundation for the memory of slavery to highlight heritage linked to slavery.
This year, the museum is offering visitors the chance to discover the works created by artist Ann Marie Valencia in 1999 for the exhibition Aurélie, Betzy et les autres… (Aurélie, Betzy and the Others…)
Coll. Musée historique de Villèle, inv. 2000.2.4
Ann Marie Valencia was a painter outside time and artistic styles. Nevertheless, the works displayed at the Villèle museum for her exhibition Aurélie, Betzy et les autres…(1999) recall a tragic buried past, but one during which Woman and Nature existed in harmony.
Recollections of women … Women who ran the estate: Ombline Desbassayns (1755 – 1846), with a firm hand; Céline de Villèle (1820 – 1896), with submission; Lucile (1901 – 1976) and Pauline (1902 – 1990) de Villèle, with self-sacrifice.
There is also the recollection of those faceless women, still present through being summarily mentioned on the yellowed paper of documents in the archives: a more or less fanciful family name given arbitrarily by the dominating society; a function, largely lacking in originality, but sufficiently evocative to remind us of practices during the period of slavery; a vague ethnic origin with its roots lost in the imprecise or even totally unknown location; finally, she was property with a monetary value, a sordid indicator of wealth which, with hindsight, appears to us as derisory as it is indecent.
The recollection of a recent past has, however, left its mark on our memory. The recollection of a continuously transformed domestic landscape that, with time, mingles cotton, coffee, spices and sugarcane.
Ann Marie Valencia reconstructs a universe inhabited by women who are beautiful, so beautiful when carrying out their thankless tasks and their harrowing daily chores. Her works present us with the delicacy of a style showing great maturity. The intelligence of her vision recreates for us the contrasted beauty of these faces, marked by repetitive hard labour. Even if her light brushstrokes, as light as rose petals, come to delicately caress the canvas support with its subtle covering of lightly creased-up tissue paper, the artist makes no concessions with effects that could be seductive for their own sake. Behind the work of art lies the artistic commitment of a totally authentic painter and the tender and respectful vision of the woman, representing the Woman in general. Ann Marie Valencia applies the colours of her emotions to reconstruct in her own way the exhumed and magnified fragments of a painful chapter of history that has not yet revealed all its secrets.
Jean Barbier
Honorary Curator of the Villèle Museum
“Over the years, these places have become very familiar to me. There’s only a gully separating my studio from the Chapelle Pointue and the Villèle Museum. Little by little, I let myself be immersed in the colour of the gardens, the light and the history that is so much a part of it. Today, I can appreciate the extent to which I was drawn in by these women and their story…”.
Ann Marie Valencia (1950-2012)
Director Jean-Paul Dupuis
