“What does it mean to make a picture of the now?”: The Aesthetics of Co-presence in Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Nou Voix and Moune Ô

Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s video work Nou Voix (Our Voices, 2018) opens with a courtroom scene from the 1990 feature film Jean Galmot, aventurier, directed by Alain Maline. The original film by Maline dramatizes the real-life story of French “adventurer” Jean Galmot, who traveled to French Guiana in 1906 with the intention of exploiting a gold mine he had inherited. Galmot would remain in Guiana for the rest of his life and hold several political offices in the French colony up until his murder by poisoning in 1928. Unrest, caused by outrage over Galmot’s murder, ensued in the capital city of Cayenne. The scene from Jean Galmot, aventurier revisited at the beginning of Nou Voix shows the end of a 1931 trial held in Nantes, France, where fourteen Guianese (twelve men and two women), referred to as the insurgés or insurgents, who had been charged with looting and murdering fellow citizens...