Le temps c’est mourir, créer à l’envers is an immersive audio-visual art work and a research-creation project which explores the notion of [collective] identity through time and space. This piece is co-created by participants and mentors of a series of workshops offered to young adults from ethnocultural communities by Vidéographe at Maison d’Haïti in autumn 2019.

Over the course of the program, the artist collective came to an agreement that notions of time and space and all forms of cultures and languages are simply productions of human’s mind and imagination. Following this statement a few questions arose for the collective, such as: “how can these concepts be reimagined in order to create new possibilities for self expression beyond the trauma of history? How these notions challenge the concept of identity for people of colour?“ In order to find answers to these questions, the group has investigated into theoretical concepts such as Cosmos and Possible Worlds to create an artistic narrative with collage imagery, sound, pictograph, symbol and text in Virtual Reality and immersive video and to associate them with new meanings.

Therefore, this piece is an attempt to reimagine a spatio-temporal trajectory which reflects the group’s understanding of identity, race, ethnicity, language, time and space. The “collective identity” that this group envisions is not a homogeneous mass, nor is it an aggregation of autonomous individuals. Rather it is a collective phenomenon within which multiple entities come into being and acquire a certain degree of cohesion and group identity, yet do so without dissolving and merging with one another. It is evident in the aesthetic handling of images, words and sounds.