The project is the starting point for an upcoming ten-year film project, Memoirs & Fictions of an Island Before its Vanishing – A Guadeloupean Trilogy. Its first chapter, ‘Voler la terre, c'est voler les corps’ (To Steal the Land Is to Steal the Bodies), retraces the history of Guadeloupe – from conquest to its ongoing struggle toward nationhood – through fragments of landscape, body, story, and archive.
Guadeloupe, a Caribbean archipelago, was inhabited by the Kalinago and Taíno peoples before Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1493. Starting in 1635, French colonisation imposed a plantation economy built on African slavery and land dispossession. Research within French archives found that visual records of this history are dominated almost entirely by the external, colonial gaze – a gap the project addresses by using cinema not to illustrate the past, but to produce narratives from the body, the archive, and its silences.
Malaury Eloi Paisley is a filmmaker and visual artist from Guadeloupe.
