The Brooklyn Rail

Raphaël Barontini’s latest exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris cements his status as one of the most vibrant contemporary voices to engage with France’s colonial past, and specifically with the lives of the Black freedom fighters who resisted oppression in the Caribbean around the time of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The show’s haunting title, Somewhere in the Night, the People Dance, is taken from The Tragedy of King Christophe, a 1963 play by the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire about Henry Christophe, a formerly enslaved Black military general who helped secure Haiti’s independence and became its first (and last) king.

Barontini, who is of Guadeloupean descent but was born and works in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, retells the stories of tragic, complex heroes like Christophe and Toussaint Louverture, but is especially devoted to resurrecting the mostly forgotten women who resisted enslavement—among them Cécile Fatiman and Sanité Bélair in Haiti, Solitude in Guadeloupe, and Claire in French Guiana. Several are referenced in his Palais de Tokyo exhibition, which conjures up Sans Souci Palace, Christophe’s now-ruined but once-magnificent royal residence in the northern mountains of Haiti. Within the Palais de Tokyo, Barontini invokes this other palace by mimicking some of its architectural features, recreating its royal regalia, and repopulating its court with a series of dreamlike costumes and portraits.

The most spectacular of these portraits is positioned at the entrance to the show. It is a large multimedia tapestry representing Fatiman, a mambo (vodou priestess) who was one of the leaders of Bois Caïman, an important 1791 gathering among enslaved individuals that precipitated the Haitian Revolution. Fatiman appears on horseback—appropriating the royal equestrian portrait type usually reserved for white male European sovereigns—as the “Princess of the Kingdom of the North,” a noble title she gained under Christophe’s regime. Brandishing a scarlet-red flag and dressed in a dazzling gold robe, she shimmers against a lush landscape that is broadly reminiscent of Haiti. Her projection of power is amplified by the use of tapestry, an honorific medium. Barontini fabricated this work with a team of embroiderers who spent more than 13,600 hours on it.

Fatiman’s portrait feels viscerally present but also strangely enigmatic in its decision to depict its subject’s eyes covered by a printed reproduction of a Fang mask. A nod to her African heritage, the mask serves as an apotropaic symbol and a powerful reminder of her historical erasure. Like many of Barontini’s unsung heroines, no visual or material trace of Fatiman survives from her lifetime. The artist thus takes creative license to reimagine his sitters using a range of source material, including African masks, photographs from French colonial albums, creole fashion accessories, and allusions to European old master artworks. His collaged creations are beautiful but they also acknowledge the ugly, violent histories of which they are a part and the ways that art has fueled the colonial project. With their visible, handcrafted seams and inclusion of grainy archival images, these works also underscore their status as partial, patchwork constructions that aim to suture some of the wounds of the past while also laying bare its silences and the limits of the historical record.

Behind Fatiman’s tapestry is a dark, dramatically lit gallery that serves as a surrogate throne room hung with spectral portraits of Christophe’s courtiers and a pair of royal saddles in the center. They all face a raised platform upon which two sumptuous robes (placeholders for Christophe and his queen, Marie-Louise) appear to hover, flanked by a pair of palace guards. To the right, a wall decorated with the rounded archways and iron grilles of Sans Souci looks out onto another space inhabited by additional costumes that stand at attention atop an oval dais. Surrounding them are two murals, one depicting Bois-Caïman and the other the Guadeloupean heroine Solitude, who fought against enslavement and was executed while pregnant in 1802. Some of these costumes evoke historical figures like Louverture, whose epithet, “Black Spartacus,” is incarnated by two gladiator uniforms. All of Barontini’s outfits, in fact, read like alluring suits of armor that appear poised to come to life and go into battle—either to assert their rightful place in history or to disrupt the standard narratives that many Western museums, including those in the heart of Paris, still continue to tell.

This second room features a sound installation by the American poet, musician, and hip-hop producer Mike Ladd, which complements Barontini’s syncretic style by mixing the sounds of court processions, crashing waves, revolutionary chants, Afro-Caribbean beats, and dystopian futures. Music and movement are intrinsic aspects of Barontini’s work, and he almost always organizes a collaborative performance, for which he also designs costumes, in conjunction with his shows. At the Palais de Tokyo he staged a nighttime “Country Dance” in front of Fatiman’s tapestry, bringing traditional Guadeloupean quadrille performers together with contemporary hip-hop dancers in a moving tableau that entwined different generations, cultures, colonial legacies, and forms of embodied resistance.

Barontini has been pushing against the French art world establishment since he was a student at the conservative École des Beaux-Arts, where, he says, there was little interest in his work. That view has shifted, and following an impressive trifecta of shows in Paris at the Mariane Ibrahim(2022), the Panthéon (2023–24), and now the Palais de Tokyo (as well as many other venues), he has garnered a great deal of attention for seeking to “unravel,” as a writer in French Vogue recently claimed, the “thick fabric of France’s colonial heritage.” For me, his most potent exhibition was the one at the Panthéon, because of the way it confronted its hallowed setting. Conceived amidst the upheavals of the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Panthéon is billed as a monument to “universal” liberty, but its vision of freedom is highly selective and mostly white, a fact that Barontini’s vivid depictions of Black freedom fighters threw into relief.

Although the Palais de Tokyo’s building was originally designed for Paris’s 1937 Exposition internationale, a celebration of French colonial power past and present, Barontini’s current exhibition does not engage critically with the site or its history. It does, however, draw attention to the stripped-down, makeshift look of its galleries in a way that complements the theme of history at once exposed and unfinished. This laboratory-like setting may have been what inspired fellow museumgoers to strike up conversations with me when I visited the exhibition, but I think it also speaks to Barontini’s desire to make his work accessible and open-ended, to prompt viewers to fill in gaps and share stories of their own.

2025 marks two hundred years since the new Haitian government was forced to pay indemnities to its former French colonizers as the price of freedom—plunging Haiti into a debt so massive that its repercussions are still being felt today. A few weeks ago, President Emmanuel Macron finally officially acknowledged the devastating impact of these indemnities and called for a French-Haitian commission to study them. Barontini’s exhibition is thus part of a larger reckoning with France’s colonial past (and Haiti in particular), and it not only reflects the current conversation but may help shape it. Time will tell whether the political rhetoric that now surrounds the task of repairing the injustices of colonialism will materialize into something more than a vision of slavery’s ghosts.