
Biography
Born in Guadeloupe, Eddy Firmin is an artist lecturer, curator, and teacher who lives and works between Montreal and Halifax, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. in Art Studies and Practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal and a Master's degree from the École Supérieure d'Art et Design le Havre-Rouen (France). Firmin is the founder of the decolonial research journal Minorit'Art and the Af-flux BLack Transnational Biennale, the first contemporary art biennale dedicated to the dialogue between black artists from Canada and abroad. Canada research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at NSCAD, he focuses on the concept of Infungible Narratives.
Statement
Eddy Firmin takes a particular interest in the politics of knowledge sharing and the epistemic conflicts that they create for the colonized artist. He strives to remediate the codes of a Caribbean ancestral custom, le Gwoka (at the crossroads of dance, song, storytelling and music). Le Gwoka is part of the very large family of Afro-Caribbean customs created to resist colonial violence, such as Paracumbé, Guineo, Bèlè, Calenda, Bomba, Tambú and many more. This imperative necessity to transfer ancestral codes to modern visual media derives from the fact that his home islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique did not give rise to a visual tradition to which one can refer, because of the restrictions of slavery on such small territories. Besides Resistance, one of the main codes of this custom is la lokans. Specific to the singer / storyteller, la lokans aims to disguise the resilience of slaves under the technicity and mastery of singing. It becomes a flower shield under which war rumbles, encapsulating the art of double language. Technicity and esthetics aim to seduce and mesmerize, while the hidden message fosters resistance to dominant discourse in the arts as in the social space.