DON’T LOOK UP

Acrylic and spraypaint on wall 

7 x 6 m 

Waterford Walls Festival, Ireland 

2024

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Immobile Traveller : Miadana

 THANK YOU! And thank you for sharing your story (below) . 

Being invited to this festival, painting in the heart of this territory, in the working-class districts of the city, as close as possible to its inhabitants, was an honor.  I was able to take the opportunity to work around what binds, beyond seas and oceans, colonised peoples... Without the censorship that has become too common in France. . Here are crossed Irish.e.s and Malagasys... Moroccans, Palestinians, Kanaks or Caribbeans...

“My name is Miadana Randriamorasata. Visual artist, I live and work in Toulouse, France.

I met Jean Rooble during his visit to L’Aérochrome, in Blagnac (Fr.). He is a very friendly person. After some discussions, he talks to me in more detail about his projects and offers to take a picture of me. I accept. Some months later, I am very emotional when I see my face on a wall in Waterford, Ireland. I am honoured and touched.

Echoing this island full of history I will talk about the island of my ancestors: Madagascar. Located in the Indian Ocean, its population is a long-standing mixed race. It has 18 ethnic groups. It is a country with a rich history. Former colony, the road that led the country to its independence in 1960 was one of the bloodiest of all the former French colonies. My parents were born in Antananarivo, the capital. My father left the island to study in France in 1975 and my mother joined him two years later... "... it was the clash of cultures," she later confided.

After a few years, I was born in Toulouse. As a teenager, I grow up feeling doubly rejected. First at school in France, I suffered mocking, on the color of my skin and texture of my hair, but also during my trips to Madagascar, where I am not accepted by some.

Today, I respond by celebrating this dual cultural heritage: that of France where I was born and that of Madagascar from which my origins. I feed myself by taking the best of these two cultures. In Madagascar there are many customs and beliefs. The dead do not They do not disappear but only change their lives. They of ancestors «Razana» and become the intermediaries between God and the alive.

The famadihana, is a great celebration that celebrates ancestors. It is funeral ceremonies that exhume the bodies of the deceased in order to Honour. I was fortunate to participate in this ceremony and dance with the dead along with my family in Madagascar. Then, with my finger raised to the sky, I point to the invisible and do not forget where I come from.”