Christelle Oyiri

I grew up in the south of Paris, in a social housing tower that was 10 floors tall. I was on the seventh floor. I had a panoramic view of the world, or at least of my city, right there from my window. There was a small children’s park—un square in French—just under my building. But there were also two highways, there were cranes and shopping centers and other social housing buildings. The landscape felt very urban, a mixture of concrete and green interrupted by different structures of power and technology.

I had a pretty loud childhood. I have a lot of older siblings, like 15 years older. My parents were going to clubs often, so we listened to all types of music—predominantly from Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Côte d'Ivoire. And there was a lot of rap and R&B. Living next to the highways, I could always hear the music, but there were other sounds that mattered just as much: sirens, motorcycles, football games. There was a stadium on the other side of the apartment, and there was a jail. There was a social tower near mine that burned down, so I felt a lot of solidarity with London’s Grenfell Tower.

My parents worked a lot, so sometimes my dad would sneak me in during his shift. He’d drop me off at the kids’ section of the museum, come by at midday for lunch, and pick me up at the end of the day. The museum catered to kids, so they exhibited information in a really sensory way. It was never alienating. I was young, so I don’t remember many of the artists they displayed, but I remember they did a retrospective on Giuseppe Arcimboldo. I was always a huge fan of his. And they had this gigantic floating globe made of metal called La Géode. There was a movie theater inside where they showcased films about nature and its cycles, and documentaries about places like New Caledonia and the Amazon. I spent a lot of time there, learning about the world beyond Paris.

I realized early on that places disappear long before they’re actually gone, before they’re physically demolished. Growing up in social housing, a lot of stuff seemed permanent. People had long housing contracts, so they didn’t move much. And the buildings were massive. But then the shops started to close, and more and more of my neighbors started to disappear. Families moved away, and the cameras multiplied.

For the longest time, I had a very naïve perception of the urban condition. I knew we didn’t have a lot of money, but we had amenities. There was a sense of community in our building that protected me from seeing poverty firsthand, that protected me from the brutality of the city. That changed for me in 2005, when two boys—Zyed and Bouna—were stopped by the police for an ID check. They weren’t doing anything wrong, but they were young and they got really scared. When they ran away, the officers knew they were entering an electrical substation but didn’t stop them. So they let them kill themselves. They didn't have any drugs, they didn't have any weapons, they didn't have anything. They were teenagers coming home from football practice. That led to major riots, and it changed my perception of life in social housing completely.

Definitely. I think of all the lost photographs of my parents as children, which I will never see. Lately, I also find myself grieving places. We used to have l'aide aux devoirs, spaces in the social housing where children would connect with elderly people to have snacks and get help with their assignments. We would eat together, and they’d help us develop our skills for school. I really grieve l'aide aux devoirs, and intergenerational spaces more broadly. I feel like the club used to offer that, much more than it does today.

I first visited when I was a baby, but as you can imagine, I don’t have any memories of that visit. So my first memories come from the second visit, when my parents sent me there alone to see my grandmother. I remember confronting myself as a traveler for the first time, five-year-old Christelle with her little suitcase, strolling through the airport to catch her first flight. When I stress about travel now, my boyfriend reminds me of this—that I’ve always been a traveler.

My grandmother had a mango tree. My first memory, and my happiest, is seeing my grandmother climbing her wooden ladder to grab a mango, splitting it in half, and cutting it up for me to eat. What I remember most is the smell. The smell of cinnamon in the air, the smell of the sea. Near the center of the island, in Pointe-à-Pitre, we have these big farmers markets my aunt used to bring me to. I remember the spice market especially. It was my first time smelling that many spices.

Guadeloupe was a safe haven, almost a refuge—the tenderness of my grandma, the vivid spices, the possibility of going to the beach every day to touch the sand. The mangroves, with all their mystery. Through all this time in nature, it became a little taste of paradise to me. My mom is super Catholic, and she was always talking to me about paradise and how to access it by being a good person. Even at 10 years old, I was like: “I don't think it gets better than this, Mom. It's all here.” Not just because of the pristine beaches and the cliché postcards, but also because I saw that many very, very old folks had their own garden and their own practices, living in a communal way. That was very healing to me.

That trip was a sort of self-investigation. My grandma had died a few years before, which made me drift away from Guadeloupe. The main reason I used to visit was to experience this sense of a bigger family. When she passed, something broke in me. So I went to grieve properly.

On my trip, I went to this beach called La Plage des Amandiers. It’s an “untreated beach,” in the sense that it’s very wild and natural, not maintained like the other beaches. Alone, I listened to Cocteau Twins and The Cure with my fruits and sandwiches and just meditated. After a while, I took a stroll through the mangrove and climbed this big hill. On top of the hill was a humongous tombstone dedicated to the slaves who died in that place. And I was like, “Oh shit. What the hell?” Throughout the trip, I went to other beaches and realized they were also cemeteries for former slaves. I had never noticed that as a kid, or even as a teenager. I was just vibing with my family then, trying to make the most out of those moments. I just never noticed.

That tombstone I saw in Sainte-Rose wasn’t inconspicuous either. It was dignified and beautiful. But then you have encounters with other slave cemeteries where you don’t even know they’re cemeteries. You figure it out because you find clues. That is traumatizing in its own way, seeing that not all of these graveyards are even acknowledged as such.

And it wasn’t left to history. When I spent time with my cousins, I realized that most of them—if not all of them—had really profound fertility issues. Their kids have developmental issues. My aunt told me that it was all caused by chlordecone, a pesticide used there for decades. I had never heard of it before, so I started doing my research. I read Decolonial Ecology by Malcom Ferdinand, and I came back to France completely outraged.

It’s what we call the triple abyss. And it’s a direct correlation, because chlordecone was only authorized in what we call the outre-mer, the overseas territories that are considered to be colonies. Yet it was ultimately banned in metropolitan France—France as you know it, France the hexagon. So you have an economy of rules that is applied there, because they always knew it was toxic.

The project is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because I definitely want to challenge the touristy TikTok traveler. My goal is to challenge the mass movement of tourism.

I'm speaking to the tourists who arrive in Guadeloupe and Martinique in search of paradise and consume this colonial fantasy, all while remaining blind to the poisoned landscape, to the poisoned people. But I am also in dialogue with my younger self. The green is so Nickelodeon-coded—it’s so gooey and cartoonish, you know? It's a deviation from green as the ultimate color and symbol of nature. I want to speak with my child self, so oblivious and playful, who experienced those islands as places of joy and reunion before understanding the history of chlordecone, contamination, and colonial extraction. Growing up and returning to these places, our memories become contaminated. Venom Voyage is a dialogue with my younger self, asking how childhood nostalgia can coexist with all of this darkness.

Amnesia is something one is subjected to. It's a passive position provoked by an accident, however tragic that accident is. I believe that oblivion is something that you choose willingly for yourself. When I think about amnesia, I think about something that I'm pushed toward, and that I have no choice but to heal from. Oblivion has an almost metaphysical implication: to start over, to challenge yourself to oblivion.

It's universal. We’re experiencing it firsthand right now in Paris. People are completely going insane, because they're realizing what's at play with the climate crisis when it comes to the distribution of responsibility and the division of resources. We have this really popular TV show in France, Quotidien. They had a small documentary talking to people about the heat wave and asking how they’re dealing with it. Once it was over, the host, Yann Barthès, looked the camera dead in the eye and said: “Everybody’s hot. Even Bernard Arnault is hot right now. So what are you all complaining about?”

It has become a huge thing in France. We’re in this situation because of people like Arnault, but somehow the reflex of this TV show—which isn’t particularly right-wing—was to make a false equivalency and put everyone in the same basket, in the same realm of responsibility. I think there is some karmic retribution in the climate crisis for France’s historical sins.

Yeah. It's like, babe, you were not supposed to be there in the first place. That type of sun is not good for you. I feel like a lot of theorists from the Négritude have been really forward thinkers, giving us tools to understand what we're going through right now. I don't think that we would have the critical theory we have right now if it wasn't for Frantz Fanon.

Communities that have lived at the edge, we have developed ways of surviving that are not only political but also sensory. For the longest time, we have been really, really looked down upon because we preserve memory through means beyond data and paper. We preserve memory through oral ritual, through music, through improvisation and everyday acts of care.

When I watch “get ready with me” videos, I can't help but think that people are craving exactly that: ritual. I think Fanon would remind us that survival is not simply endurance. It's also our ability to produce forms of life within systems that are designed to erase them. I don't want to romanticize resilience. I think the point is not that colonial violence produces wisdom, but that people have continually invented ways to refuse disappearance despite it. Those practices are not relics of the past. They're technologies to imagine different futures.

I think that all creation comes from rupture. I don't see them as opposite values. For creation—not necessarily to exist, but to subsist over a long period of time—we need to be in rupture with something. I think all the art we consider timeless has become so precisely because it broke a mold and redistributed the cards.

The artist, and especially the DJ, is the master of time and ceremony. You bring ritual into a place that doesn't value it anymore, and you bring physical contact and connection into a world of disconnection. I see music as a portal, as a vibrational plate that shakes things up and redistributes cards and fates. I also believe that music has more immediacy than any other art form. When I think about cinema, it’s a very collaborative and industrial practice. It's really difficult to bring it to life without tons of people, tons of industry, and tons of technology. Music is quite autonomous—you can even discover it in nature. So I rate music as the cardinal value and the most unifying force that we have in these times. I think that it creates pathways and dialogues and practices that hopefully can coexist outside of the club too. I think that it creates friendships and love ties that no other medium can really create.

I try to book talent across generations. I recently booked DJ Diaki, who’s in his 50s. I focus on booking artists who don’t thrive solely because of a certain aesthetic, mold, or age range. I try to look toward the sonic innovation they bring. Laraaji is a really good example, being in his 80s and being the freshest in all the ways—in his sound, but also in the way that he dresses, the way he carries himself, and the dialogues he's willing to have with younger folks. That's the energy I really want to bring to my parties. Figuring out how to engage a really young audience in the age of social media, in the age of the ultimate bimbo DJ, is complex.

My faith was reconstructed when I began reading more about precolonial religion—like the Akan religion, which had a big influence on my first EP, Mere Noises. I always thought about spirituality as a transcendental thing, where God is above you and you need to look up to see him. You’re this little thing and he’s this big thing. I understand it, I salute it. But there were also other feelings I wanted to experience from religiosity and spirituality. It couldn’t just be that. I thought: “So, that’s it?” No. It’s got to be something else.

I’m a Spinoza girl. I really love the way he talked about God, about immanence. He argued that God is not necessarily vertical, but can also be horizontal. That thinking shifted a lot of stuff for me, because I also noticed the way my foremothers and forefathers in West Africa, and more specifically in Côte d'Ivoire and in my tribe, thought of God as immanent before Christianization. It is ultimately an environmental understanding of God.

Right. So discovering the Akan religion was a shift, both because it included nature and because it rejected Manichaeism. I’m a Gemini, and we are creatures of nuance and contradiction. I think that organized religion is always about acting like you have no contradictions. What I found in the Akan religion, and in precolonial religions more broadly, is an essential recognition of the power of nature, the power of symbolism, and the power of femininity, which is all stuff I value a lot. The power of vibration, too, especially in the Kongo religion.

For Black femmes, these things become a life force—for self-esteem, for a sense of self. These are things that, generally speaking, monotheist religions don’t care about. Femininity is a disease responsible for sin, vibrations are devilish, nature is scary and meant to be tamed. There are a lot of things I like about Catholicism, but I never saw myself fully within it. I feel like it's a tough book for a Black femme, let alone a queer person. I'm like, “Okay, what the fuck am I going to do with this?” I had to find other places to pull from. I needed something to spice it up a little bit, and to make it look more like the life that I want to live, you know? I went to Catholic school for a really long time, which might have also changed my perception.

I have learned how to toy with hauntology in a way that fits my own personality. I don’t imagine it through this classic image of someone who is haunted by ghosts to the point of paralysis, to the point of doing nothing. I see hauntology as a little girl playing with ghosts, and building something new with these ghosts of her past.

People often think hauntology is a Mark Fisher concept, when it's actually from Jacques Derrida. When he coined the term in Specters of Marx, he didn’t argue that the ghost simply imprisons us. The ghost is something unresolved. And he insists on this, because to be haunted is also to inherit responsibility toward an unfinished struggle. For me, it's not the specter that says everything is over; it's what remains that can still be done.

There is a pessimistic hauntology, a critical hauntology, and a generative hauntology, where ghosts become material to compose with. That’s where I’m leaning. My performances don’t simply mourn disappearing worlds. They are staged encounters between ruins and Black sonic culture and new mythologies and video games, between religious symbolism and French philosophy. They offer a terrain of fragments from different temporalities that become recombined. I see everything as a playground for syncretism—an ethics of remixing, which is what I love the most.

Exactly. A ghost is better than no sign, you know? That's how I see things.

Yeah, I feel like our generation has had our brains fried by horrorcore. I’m not mad about it.

Growing up in a really, really religious context, I began flirting with the idea of breaking from the mold completely. If I wanted to escape my upbringing, and to really piss off my religious family, the most violent way to do so was to become a goth. It was the only thing I could do. I found so much comfort in the darkness. I knew the world wasn’t as they made it out to be, and I wanted to find that out for myself.

When I was young as fuck, maybe 19, I was a music journalist. I was writing about rap for a very long time before all of this. When you listen to the music people are making right now, to new trap music and the new girls and the new boys, the sound signature, the hi-hats, the placement of the bass, nothing’s really that far away from ’94 and ’95 Three 6 Mafia. There's something about the way they were recording—the fact that they were recording on a two-track tape recorder in the ’90s, when motherfuckers in Brooklyn were already recording in big studios in Manhattan. You already had Bad Boy Records making rap sound like pop music, simply because of the way it was mastered. So I always wondered why we could have such lush and pristine sound mastering in rap music then, but when I listen to something from Memphis from the same year, it sounds like a ghost is trapped in the tape recorder because it’s so lo-fi.

My project Belief May Vary was definitely a self-inquiry in part. I see my faith as something that is ever-changing. My values are always going to be the same—I'm always going to have faith—but the content of my faith itself will always be malleable, adaptable, ever-changing. And I welcome it. I don't see it as a moral failure, or even a faith failure. I see it as something really powerful and playful.

Wow. That's actually crazy, because I was watching House of the Dragon with my boyfriend yesterday, and one of the Targaryens was like, "Oh, if I don't have more kids, my lineage will disappear." And I was telling my boyfriend, “I perfectly think that this is my dad's worst nightmare.” I think, as a ghost, I kind of want to be like Grand-Mère Feuillage—Grandmother Willow, the tree from Pocahontas.

I don't like the idea of my body becoming a monument. I'd rather return it to a cycle that is larger than memory itself. I like the thought of decomposition as a form of transformation. But at the same time, I'm kind of torn. A lot of my work asks what survives—whether it's sound, images, ritual—and the body is probably the least permanent thing that we own. I hope my body becomes ordinary again. That it becomes soil and mineral, something that nourishes, something that can participate in another ecology. That's more beautiful to me than permanence.