monsterhood
12/2024
Charles-Arthur Feuvrier
untitled (2024)
Savat DoDo Straps
Shivani Ragavoodoo
petits monstres (2024)
woven vacoas
BAD x resort
BAD (2024)
re-appropriation of BAD Mauritian record llabel logo by resort
Kalysto Sheikh
untited (2024)
faux leather, silicon, superglue
Gloria Vivien
untitled (2024)
Documentation of Mare Chicose on fire
Exhibition text by Ariel Saramandi
curated by resort, assisted by Annabelle Ah Chong and Gloria Vivien
monsterhood
Mare Chicose, on fire for over a month this year. Over the past decade of its existence, the landfill occasionally reminds the country-at-large of what it prefers not to see, touch, think about. Waste is uncomfortable, waste is disgusting, waste is death. It’s so easy to slip our junk, gunk, rot into black plastic bags, never to be seen again (we think) once the lorries come by. It is impossible, however, to escape the smoke.
We are especially good at disposing of our waste quickly. In the tropics, things fester faster, die faster, fertilise faster. Re-awaken faster. And Mare Chicose collects. It gathers the too-literal receipts of our lives. When it ignites, the fumes – tentacular in scope – reach into our homes, reminding us that the divide between our spaces and our trash is one we’ve constructed only in our minds. There is no divide. Our bodies, our waste and our earth are inextricable.
What are we smelling? Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Wrappers and mattresses and tyres. The skin, bones, flesh of little animals. Plastic, plastic, plastic.
Mare Chicose may be one of the nation’s greatest art forms. Because it is monstruous. And monsters, to quote Charlie Fox, ‘cause trouble, they disturb definitions, they discombobulate what we think we mean. All of which is brave and wild, not to mention something like art’s task.’
In the tropics, too, we don’t like things that disrupt our ways of being, our island mechanics, the stereotypes we fit others into, the petrified ideas in which we see ourselves.
‘Transformation, which is a monster’s whole game, simultaneously alter[s] their bodies and chang[es] the surrounding culture like radioactive fall-out,’ writes Fox. It ‘is a mode of catharsis’. Mare Chicose, with its wells of poisonous water called leachate, with its poisonous fumes. Mare Chicose, a cure for our ills: only by confronting what we are – crudely, honestly – can we hope to change.
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Our intervention happened three weeks and two days after the landfill ignited in November 2024. The site was blacked out on Google Maps: an issue of national security, or was the great Mauritian super-ego at work, quickly cleansing the island’s image of anything that could stain it?
Initially, we’d planned just on showcasing the abandoned village near the landfill site: a way of acquainting ourselves with this ghost-community. But the toxic air, the change in government, the unfolding environmental disaster, the tension –– they all called us to engage with the site at large, village and landfill together.
Homes built among sprawling hills; homes now with walls cracked open, nature creeping in, winding through cupboards, fruit-painted tiles, once-dainty wallpaper. A single butik. A whole community forced to leave by the state.
Bones of an existence are what’s left. Stray dogs take to the abandoned homes for shelter. We think, but we’re not sure, that some people still live here, in defiance of the law.
Shivani Ragavaoodoo walked us through the village and showed us the home that belonged to her aunt and uncle. A punkishly painted ‘Neha’ adorns a corner of a wall, in pink and black. This was her cousin’s bedroom. The house was set alight.
We walked beyond the house and towards a river bordered by lush vegetation. A perfect place for a retreat, if it weren’t for the synthetic stench, the noise of excavators, the heavy artillery that used to dig, to hide what we prefer not to see. But Mare Chicose hasn’t been hiding anything for years. The excavators can barely make room: our towering waste are the new hills of the village’s environs, on full display.