Ceysson & Bénétière is pleased to present the recent works of artist Stephané Edith Conradie, created this spring during her residency at La Chaulme. Her work questions the way identity is constructed within the domestic sphere, in a context that intertwines the legacies of colonialism and creolization.
Growing up in a country whose culture she does not fully share, Stephané Edith Conradie places her identity reflections at the heart of her artistic practice. She says: "I am of the place but not entirely indigenous to the land. (…) My bundles or assemblages will aim to reflect on the idea of being simultaneously alien and indigenous to a place." She identifies with the descendants of the Rehoboth Basters who left the Cape Colony in 1868 to settle in what is now Namibia. Her presence in this country is therefore the result of historical movements, making her neither foreign nor indigenous. Hence, the concept of home appears as a fictional space, one that we appropriate out of a need for belonging—an ever-shifting and unstable area vulnerable to historical and political forces. For the artist, domesticity is constructed through small, accessible, and mobile objects that working-class people often accumulate to decorate their interiors, which can be taken with them when forced to leave. Conradie integrates these objects into her assemblages, juxtaposing porcelain figurines, trinkets, and cheap ornaments. Collected from second-hand markets or forgotten interiors, these small popular treasures bear witness to intimate and collective histories. Their value is not monetary but emotional. They comfort, gather, and soothe. A true archaeologist of the intimate, Conradie breathes new life into these scattered memory fragments, reassembling and accumulating them, giving the apparent kitsch a strong symbolic significance.
This principle takes on a new resonance in the artist’s recent use of uranium glass, whose luminescence under UV light evokes a supernatural glow.
Harmless in this form, this material contains traces of a highly toxic mineral, extracted from deep within the earth—particularly in Namibia, which accounts for 6% of global production. An extraterrestrial mineral born from a supernova, it has become a source of energy or destruction, but here it is brought back to the intimate, decorative, almost innocent scale. However, this glowing glass carries a history of dispossession. In Namibia, as elsewhere, uranium extraction is in the hands of foreign powers and does not benefit local populations. It reignites the colonial legacy of resource plundering in Africa, without compensation. Uranium thus becomes a haunted material: that of a colonial ghost, an invisible violence, still at work.
As a vector of troubled memory, her work extends a reflection on appropriation, colonial circulations, and silent forms of dispossession, contributing to a broader reflection by the artist on the creation of a Creole aesthetic.
