Olivier Marboeuf is an artist, storyteller, independent curator, cultural theorist, and film producer. In the 1990s, together with the artist and writer Yvan Alagbé, he founded Amok, a comic book publishing house. Between 2004 and 2018, he was the artistic director of Espace Khiasma, a space dedicated to promoting the visual arts and literature. Having worked in multiple creative fields, he also dedicates his time to audiovisual work, producing films and documentaries.
In his artistic practices, Marboeuf explores themes such as imperialism, servitude, and the consequences of racial oppression, which feed into his work, characterized by being a space for reflection and social and political debate, anchored in post-colonial theories, indispensable tools for putting emancipatory strategies into practice. It is an approach that seeks not only to revisit the past but also to open up new ways of narrating and representing history.
La Ronde des vies bonnes [The Round of Good Lives] (2025), a site-specific installation for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, is an ephemeral fresco in which water and liquidity become more than metaphors for the diasporic Black and Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Bodily fluids, dams, aquatic entities, and urban water networks, oceans and seas, deltas, sandbanks, mobile continents of pollution and sargassum – all these are sites of memory, struggle, and living archives of chaotic metamorphoses. They are animated spaces where transplanted bodies-landscapes intertwine.
It is this process of becoming human, beyond catastrophe, at once monstrous, interdependent, and collective, that gives life to the installation. A constellation of possible – and good – paths populates the work, in which blue acquires a new meaning, the color of a history that exceeds Blackness and disappearance, that transcends the boundaries between the living and the dead. It evokes the color of precedents, resistant, recurrent, reoccurring, in the form of visual and auditory hallucinations, the word “blue” present at the beginning of blueprints, the term for designs, maps, and precedents.