Leslie Amine

Leslie Amine was born in 1981, she lives and works in Lyon (FR)

“Lyon–Marseille via Cotonou, 2005–2006.
From one city to another, from one continent to the next, I collect data from the urban environment where a multitude of codes intersect and define the identity of places. Born and raised in France, of Beninese origin — ‘a product of immigration, stuck between two worlds, shaped by post-colonial multiculturalism, foreign here, foreign there’ — all clichés I once tried to avoid in my silent, origin-free artistic research, and which I now explore through an investigation of both worlds and the signs that compose them.

My creative practice is built on establishing relationships between our various living spaces, revealing the ‘elsewhere here’ — which, in fact, only emerges here — and the forms of urban resistance that arise from it.

Through photographic archiving of the places I pass through, I gather models and recombine them. The scenes I work with are drawn from street life and commerce: makeshift market stalls, informal shops, overflowing displays, signage, an abundance of objects. I deconstruct these images through drawing — either incorporating them into installations or using them directly, printed in black and white, and collaged like street posters.

My installations disrupt visual order, constructing scenic spaces or zones of movement — interactive setups using low-cost, highly coded materials: cardboard, plastic ‘immigrant’ bags, scrap wood, salvaged paper, everyday items like chairs, matchsticks, or carts — all previously used.

Through various customizations — painting, layering paper or cardboard, collage, and cutting — I generate new meanings and aim to destabilize shared cultural references. I combine drawing, photography, video, using words and objects — street signs, torn posters, abandoned fragments. My approach examines urban abundance, concepts of work, space, identity, language, belonging, and appearance. I create spaces without narrative, where viewers become disoriented, much like travelers must trust their senses at the risk of returning ‘suddenly empty-handed.’

Street codes, tied to commercial spaces, become vectors of mercantile exchange, which I transform into spaces for visual, verbal, and conceptual dialogue — sparking curiosity and offering reinterpretations of what I call ‘exchange dispensers.’

Rooted in daily improvisation, my work uses basic materials in constant recycling. It operates through systems of opposition and complementarity: rootedness and mobility, private and public space, Africa and Europe.
South? North? Ubiquity?
The installation aspires to be in several places at once, jumping quickly from one zone to another, making visible a circulation between urban realities — posh, cheap, religious, DIY, or makeshift neighborhoods…
Across palaces and public squares, abundance flows.

The project reflects my contemporary urban reality — a blend of places, a pervasive exoticism, a kind of nomadism — where one must find a place, take a stance, and position the buyer-customer-passerby-visitor as a tourist facing off with the seller-maker-producer-artist.
Who is who?
The tourist, just touring the world.

’Suddenly empty-handed’, a phrase from the text La fabrique de cérémonie by Togolese playwright Kossi Efoui, used in the 2004 installation Eden Garden. This novel explores themes of exoticism, travel, and the uprootedness of a protagonist suspended between two cultures.”

- Leslie Amine