Beachcomber Magazine 04

Alicia Maurel & Lætitia Lor A DYNAMIC DUO DUO DE CHOC They live in Mauritius and are passionate about the cultures of the Indian Ocean. They founded the cultural and arts platform “The Third Dot” to communicate a hybrid oceanic way of thinking and multifarious art that questions the notion of borders. Elles vivent à Maurice et se passionnent pour les cultures de l’océan Indien. Fondatrices de la plateforme culturelle et artistique « The Third Dot », elles se font l’écho d’une pensée océane hybride et d’un art pluriel qui questionnent la notion de frontière. BY JEAN-PASCAL BILLAUD PHOTOGRAPHS CLAUDE WEBER A t Dock 13 at Trou Fanfaron Harbour in Port Louis, the vast 700 m 2 former warehouse echoes with the laughter of Lætitia Lor and Alicia Maurel, delighted to have found this huge port building to house their recently established cultural and arts platform, The Third Dot. NO LIMITS Since they started working together four years ago, Alicia, the highly qualified Mauritian, and Lætitia, the nomadic French artist, have been keen to bring Mauritian industrial heritage sites back to life, at least for a short while. What are they hoping to achieve? “ We want visitors to dis- cover what really belongs to them by breathing life into these places with pop-up exhibitions on various themes ranging from the playful to the more sophisticated. ” And whenever they usemore standard venues, they’re not afraid of breaking the rules. The Metaform exhibition in 2018 took over the mezzanine level in Rogers House, an iconic modernist building that is home to one of the most active corporations in Mauritius, a pioneer in tourism and aviation. The public loved the strange misap- propriated objects and playful assemblages by Mauritian artists that had boldly replaced the traditional heavy bronzes usually found in the public areas and offices of Rogers Capital. As one patronwho collaborates with the dynamic duo says: “ You have to be ready to feel unsettled, disturbed and tomomentarily lose your bearings! ” MULTIFARIOUS ART In April 2019, The Third Dot is occu- pying the Granary Building – a former grain warehouse turned gloomy garage – with the second edition of an exhibition first launched in March 2016, Borderline(s) : the duo explains that “ the ’s’ extends an invitation to artists from all over the Indian Ocean and to question the notion of limits and borders. ” The exhibition introduces us to prolific multimedia creator-guides from Mauritius itself as well as Réunion Island, Madagascar, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, India and Australia. The hundred works in the exhibition – paintings, photos, sculptures, performance and video art – demonstrate the current creative buzz, fuelled by the cultural diversity caused by migration and by massive environmental upheaval. “ We wanted to examine ’the evolution of artistic spaces in postcolonial countries ’” says Alicia Maurel, who wrote a thesis with the same title at the very international Central Saint Martins College of Arts in London. THE OTHER SPACE Hybridity lies at the heart of their research. The Third Dot wants to be a space at the intersection of memory and culture, ways of expressing oneself, in the “in-between space” that gives rise to open, wide-ranging and fluid thinking, art that is alive, multifarious and hybrid. Alicia Maurel and Lætitia Lor quote one of the thinkers that inspires them, Homi Bhabha, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard: “ The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, some- thing new, which we can’t recognise, a new negotiating ground for mea- ning and representation. ” Alicia and Lætitia are exploring these territories and they aspire to turn Mauritius into the new artistic hub of the Indian Ocean by decoding, as they say, “ the changes that happen beyond the colonial past that dominated the region, changes that trigger more and more innovative practices in the creative world. ” 