This Is Not Your El Dorado
2021
Arts Gallery 18 rue de l’Hotel de Ville, Paris

Curators Dominique Malaquais and Julie Peghini gave Amin carte blanche for his collaborative performance This Is Not Your El Dorado which took place at the Cité Internationale des arts in Paris on September 11, 2021 from 6:37 pm to 7:54 pm as part of their larger project, Performative Utopias, an academic conference on contemporary African performance. An obsessive reader of fiction, Amin saw this as an opportunity to write his own story through performance. He conceived of each of the five levels of the Cité’s gallery as a chapter within a novel running through the mind of the reader/observer. For this happening, 18 performances, both live and pre-recorded in sound or video, took place at the same time. Its prologue was a sound piece presented outside the gallery’s doors in which Cameroonian writer Lionel Manga read aloud his short story in French about the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Paris-based actor Olivier Llorden screeched as he interacted with a Minotaur-like helmet created by Amin. Once the doors to the show were officially opened, Congolese poet and rapper Vhan Olsen Dombo seemed to pull himself with a rope into the white cube, crawling through the churning legs of the crowd. Inside as out, Amin’s sculptural pieces connected the varied performances as if by a thread. Multidisciplinary artists from across the globe adopted his helmets, masks, blindfolds, bustiers, fingernails, Arabic letters and ceremonial Hindu pigment to tell a story that was not only his, but part of their own. Dominique and Julie wrote in their curatorial note: “The dreams and myths of some are the source of marginalization and exile for others. This Is Not Your El Dorado confronts this terrible paradox.”