Florence Lazar is a French photographer, filmmaker and visual artist. Her filmmaking practice draws on documentary research into interstitial historical spaces to construct subjective accounts in the face of ordained history.
It’s All Thanks to Bad Weather considers Anse Bellay, a shoreline area in Martinique where an effect of Hurricane Dean, in 2007, was to exhume a layered necropolis of Amerindian and enslaved Black people on the grounds of a former sugar plantation. Their remains were classified as mobilier archéologique – archaeological artifacts – and declared property of the French state. This nomenclature echoed Article 44 of the Code Noir, which categorised enslaved Black bodies as “moveable property”. A citizen’s collective formed to demand the return of these remains of nameless people to their sacred land.
In 125 Hectares, Véronique Montjean, a member of a farming collective in Martinique, recounts the struggle to occupy and reclaim land for community healing and nutrition in the face of rampant real-estate development. In Lazar’s films, writes anthropologist Paola Lavra, obscured histories “become the basis for counter-narratives that propose poetic reinterpretations – in which the critical gaze couples with hope, nourished by the wisdom of the trees and the earth”.
