A dance filmed on a phone can outlive the place where it happened. The image remains, but the people who made the movement, the terms they used for it and the sounds that moved them may be separated by years and platforms. Christelle Oyiri’s film Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi begins from that unsettled survival. It follows a dance that travelled from Abidjan to the suburbs of Paris, where Black French young people made it visible in streets, stations and online. Oyiri does more than retrieve an overlooked style. She asks what a body knows when the public record has misplaced the people who taught it to move.
The Paris-based artist works with film, sculpture, sound, performance and music as CRYSTALLMESS. Her practice follows cultural forms that institutions often encounter after the community that invented them has already changed. A dance clip, a rapper’s voice, the shine of an imagined holiday and the glow of a monitor become materials through which she studies memory and power. The time in these works is rarely orderly. The past can return as a digital trace; a future can arrive as a commercial promise whose costs are buried beneath its colour. Oyiri builds environments where those layers can be heard and seen together.
Her Ivorian, Guadeloupean and Martinican family background is recorded by the Serpentine. In a Villa Albertine account of her artistic interests, she describes herself as descended from different shores of the Atlantic and speaks about Black American culture’s capacity for renewal. Afrofuturism is part of this field of inquiry: an Artagon residency biography explicitly places the connections among music, spirituality and Afrofuturism in her research. The label opens one door into the work. What stays with a visitor is the precision of the doorways she actually makes.
The dance and its missing address
Collective Amnesia was made between 2018 and 2022. The Kitchen’s presentation describes its combination of found footage, staged scenes and three-dimensional animation. In its fictional story, a girl who has lost her memory finds clues through art, music, sorcery and a new friendship with another young immigrant person. The film does not treat memory as a file waiting to be recovered intact. It makes remembering a movement through different media and relationships.
Logobi began in Abidjan and acquired another life among Black French youth in the Paris suburbs in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The Kitchen describes dance crews performing in public places, including subway stations and shopping areas. Online, the dancers used Skyblogs and informal databases to share tracks and profiles. Those channels mattered because the dance did not depend on a formal stage or a museum to exist. It could appear wherever people gathered, then circulate beyond that spot through a recording made and exchanged by its participants.
The dance brought fast electronic sounds into contact with coupé-décalé. The Kitchen’s account describes a vocabulary of quick movement, mime and bluff. To film that history is to work with materials that were never made to serve as a tidy institutional archive. A clip may tell a viewer what a gesture looked like without preserving its local joke or its social charge. A track may survive while the names of the people who moved to it disappear. Oyiri’s staged and animated passages let these gaps remain active within the film rather than pretending the archive has become complete.
Oyiri has told Sludge that the film grew from her wish to join a conversation among Black women artists in France. She began shooting with her own camera and assembled footage she had already collected. That origin helps explain the film’s energy. It was made from within a network of artistic curiosity, not as a detached monument erected after the dance had vanished. The maker’s own passage from DJing and writing into film is part of the story of how one medium may need another to carry what it hears.
The film’s fiction is important. A documentary chronology could name the first appearance of a dance, locate clips and interview participants. Oyiri uses a character’s missing memory to make the audience feel the unstable route by which culture is inherited. The viewer follows clues rather than receiving a finished list. The encounter with a second young immigrant person gives that route a social form. Remembering happens between people, and the sonic archive gains force when it becomes something they can move through together.
The artist’s website also records Collective Amnesia as a work about the forgotten digital ecosystem around Logobi. A dance filmed in a station was simultaneously public and easy to lose. Platforms change, links decay, devices disappear, and a scene that once filled a screen may be hard to find a decade later. Oyiri’s use of found material and digital animation meets this paradox directly. She does not restore an untouched past. She makes a new audiovisual space in which its traces can speak again.
Krull’s interview with Berlin musician Kya Kyani offers a related account of music, image and identity moving between online encounters and physical creative communities. Oyiri’s film has its own French and Ivorian history, yet the connection makes clear how easily a digitally visible cultural life can be mistaken for a complete record. The people behind the sound still need to be heard.
A monument made of sound
Oyiri returned to young musical lives in HYPERFATE. The Kitchen showed the film as part of its OBLIMEMBER programme, while the LAS Art Foundation identifies it as a thirteen-minute work screened again in Berlin in 2025. Its subject is the way dead rappers can become figures of prophecy and sainthood in public memory. The artist’s question is not whether fame makes a life meaningful. It is what happens to the life when fans, images, music and an industry begin turning its death into a story.
In a conversation with LAS curator Sam Ozer, Oyiri says she wanted to make small monuments where people could gather and reflect. She speaks of rappers whose futures were cut short and of the troubling speed with which mourning becomes mythology. The word monument can suggest a fixed statue. Her film moves, sounds and can be screened again in another setting. That mobility allows the memorial to change with the listeners who enter it.
HYPERFATE places a cosmic scale beside a brutal social one. The artist’s work page describes supernova imagery at its beginning and her question about whether young stars already knew their fate. A supernova can make the death of a star beautiful from a distance. On Earth, the deaths Oyiri considers belong to people with families, communities and unfinished work. The film’s relation between those scales is uneasy by design. Its speculative imagery cannot make a killing inevitable, nor should the language of prophecy make the conditions of a young artist’s life disappear.
That unease continues in Hauntology of an OG, which Oyiri co-directed with photographer Neva Wireko. The LAS production credits name Darius “Mak” Clayton as narrator and music by CRYSTALLMESS and Wraith9. The film follows Memphis, Tennessee, a city whose name invokes ancient Egypt and whose built environment includes a pyramid beside the Mississippi. LAS connects that monument with the histories of the city’s rap, conflict and loss. Oyiri and Wireko do not need to send Memphis into outer space to make its geography strange. Its inherited symbols already let one place speak in several times at once.
The work’s sound is an architecture, not a soundtrack placed behind a history lesson. In an interview about the Berlin exhibition, Oyiri discusses the voice of Memphis rapper Princess Loko and the city’s cassette culture. A voice carried into a new film can be heard by people who never encountered its first circulation. It also remains someone’s voice, embedded in a local musical history. Oyiri’s sequencing of sound, image and spoken text keeps those two facts in tension. A listener can enter a future relation to the recording without claiming to own its past.
The room that listens back
In 2025, LAS presented Dead God Flow at CANK in Berlin. The foundation’s account describes a site-specific environment pairing Hauntology of an OG with HYPERFATE through light, sound, video and spatial design. A visitor did not meet the films as two isolated files. They entered a room whose sensory cues connected them. The environment gave the artist’s recurring concerns with death, memory and musical myth a physical duration.
An installation photograph published by LAS shows a green-lit passage leading toward a projected figure. The view makes orientation uncertain. A body enters through an opening, yet the image ahead seems to suspend another body in light. The arrangement invites movement toward the screen while keeping a distance between viewer and apparition. It makes the act of looking part of the work’s account of who can be present after disappearance.
The installation also used a pyramid-shaped seating structure, as Wallpaper reported from the exhibition. The form refers to a monument, but it has a practical use: visitors can sit, stay and listen. That change of scale is typical of Oyiri. She takes an immense symbol and asks what a person can do with it in a room. The seated listener becomes part of the monument’s living arrangement rather than a spectator looking up at a distant object.
Oyiri’s LAS conversation links the title Dead God Flow to a changing search for saints and meanings. The work attends to the elevation of musicians after death, but its form resists a single sacred image. Two films sit in a field of sound and light; a visitor may shift position, return to a passage or hear a phrase differently after the other film. Meaning occurs in sequence. It can be revised by the body moving through space.
That method grows from DJing. Oyiri told Interview in a conversation with Arthur Jafa that a DJ thinks ahead while the crowd is hearing the current song, holding another track in the headphones before bringing it into the room. A set joins works made at different times and turns their transition into a new event. In Dead God Flow, the connection between films is similarly composed. The future is heard a moment before it becomes shared sound.
Watching the watchers
An earlier installation, AN EYE FOR AN “I”, approached power through the act of looking. The Museum MMK in Frankfurt presented it in 2024 and describes the choufs, lookouts who warn drug dealers while staying difficult to trace themselves. The museum’s framing connects that figure to cameras, tracking and the traces people leave online. The visitor is asked to think about freedom when surveillance can follow an action, a feeling or a habit.
The work reverses an everyday assumption that more visibility automatically means more power. A chouf needs to see without being seen. On a social platform, a person may feel expressive while a distant system assembles patterns from their activity. These are different situations, and Oyiri’s installation does not make them identical. Their friction gives the title its force: an eye watches, but an “I” also speaks. The relation between those two letters becomes a question about how a self is formed under observation.
MMK’s exhibition booklet reproduces a still from I SEE YOU, the moving-image work at the centre of Oyiri’s inquiry into watching and being watched. Its title makes an address out of an ordinary act of surveillance. Seeing can mean recognition or exposure, and the two meanings do not offer the same safety. The exhibition put that ambiguity into an immersive environment, allowing a visitor to consider how a person might guard their own view while cameras and digital systems continue to collect traces of them.
The surveillance question also sharpens the Logobi film. Young dancers used digital platforms to build a record on their own terms, yet those same networks could fail to preserve the scene or expose its people to other kinds of scrutiny. The screen that lets a movement travel has no promise of care built into it. Oyiri’s work follows this double capacity of technology. It can carry a community’s inventions across distance, and it can arrange that community as data for someone else.
The holiday that poisons itself
In VENOM VOYAGE, Oyiri turns from a watcher to a tourist. Her website describes an installation resembling a travel agency, its familiar promise of adventure colliding with the contamination of soil and water in Guadeloupe and Martinique from agricultural pesticide use. The cheerful language of escape becomes unstable as the visitor learns what the image leaves outside its frame. A destination marketed as paradise is also a place where people live with damage.
Oyiri told Frieze that the project first existed in her mind as a film idea, Poison Paradise, a revenge plot in a post-apocalyptic Caribbean. She chose bright, cartoonlike colours to avoid delivering the subject as an infographic. The colours draw a visitor close before the premise changes their meaning. An inviting palette can be a trap when the object it advertises hides a poisoned landscape.
This is a different kind of speculative scene from the one in HYPERFATE. The latter uses cosmic scale to ask how death becomes myth. VENOM VOYAGE uses the design language of a business that sells a future holiday. Its time is cruelly practical: a visitor buys the promise of pleasure while the environmental consequences of past and present extraction continue for residents. The installation asks whose future the advertisement is allowed to picture.
The work also returns to Oyiri’s concern with incomplete sight. A tourist image crops the landscape. A travel office packages an itinerary. A brand teaches the viewer where to look and what to ignore. Oyiri arranges familiar props and colours so that the instruction becomes visible. Once the illusion breaks, the viewer must decide whether the attractive surface can still be taken at face value.
Across these works, the artist does not settle for one emblem of Black futurity. A lost dance reappears through animation and a fictional friendship. A rapper’s recorded voice enters another city’s monument. A visitor sits inside a pyramid to hear two films touch. A lookout watches a surveillance system. A holiday advertisement turns against itself. The future in Oyiri’s practice is made at the point where an inherited image changes under pressure from the people who inhabit it. Sound carries memory forward, but it also asks who will be there to listen when it arrives.