Margaux and Raphaël Blavy Collection
Historic stone passage inside the former stables of Château de Montgoger, one of the sites of MONUMENT’AFRICA.

Upcoming

MONUMENT’AFRICA

Against Permanence — Contemporary African art, heritage and monumentality at the scale of a village.

Presented with

  • AR(t)CHIPEL Festival
  • Centre Pompidou
  • Centre-Val de Loire Region
  • Margaux and Raphaël Blavy Collection
Read the press release

PDF · English · opens in a new tab

Download the Word file

Venue

Château de Montgoger and Saint-Épain

Date

16–18, 23–25 October and 30 October–2 November 2026

Artists

View all artists

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Alexander Calder’s death, MONUMENT’AFRICA brings together twenty international artists across four heritage sites in Saint-Épain, transforming the village into an exhibition territory where monumentality, memory and movement are reconsidered.

Themes

  • monumentality
  • memory
  • transformation
  • heritage
  • movement

Practical information

  • Press visits: 26–27 September 2026
  • Inaugural weekend: 16–18 October 2026
  • Open to the public: 16–18 and 23–25 October, then 30 October–2 November 2026
  • In partnership with the Centre Pompidou, the Centre-Val de Loire Region and the AR(t)CHIPEL Festival

Curatorial note

On the fiftieth anniversary of Alexander Calder’s death, the Margaux and Raphaël Blavy Collection and the AR(t)CHIPEL Festival, in partnership with the Centre Pompidou and the Centre-Val de Loire Region, present MONUMENT’AFRICA — Against Permanence.

Bringing together twenty international artists across the Château de Montgoger and the village of Saint-Épain, the exhibition asks what a monument can become when it is no longer understood as a fixed declaration of power, but as a living space of memory, movement and transformation.

Across four heritage sites, monumental works, immersive installations and site-specific interventions turn the village itself into the exhibition territory.

01

Against Permanence

Bianca Bondi — Red List Hector’s Dolphin (The Fall and Rise), 2021.
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA — The Furietti Old Centaur, 2018.

The monument has historically embodied permanence, authority and official memory. The artists gathered here displace those inherited forms. Monumentality becomes a field of negotiation between memory and forgetting, presence and disappearance, inheritance and invention.

In dialogue with Calder’s mobiles and stabiles, the exhibition extends a radical intuition: form need not be fixed in order to endure. Structures inherited from power are suspended, fragmented, reassembled and transformed. The monument ceases to be a statement and becomes a question — an architecture of relation.

02

At the Scale of a Village

The former stables of Château de Montgoger — exhibition site.
N’dary Lo — Triple Flight, 2010.

Four heritage sites

  • The former stables of Château de Montgoger — the monumental heart of the exhibition
  • The church of Saint-Épain — a dialogue between Aliou Diack’s composition and the sacred architecture
  • The Wooden Theatre — Lebohang Kganye’s constructed figures between performance, circus and memory
  • The Presbytery Museum — works by N’dary Lo, Igshaan Adams and Ferdinand Kokou Makouvia

The route unfolds through architecture, landscape and village life. Rather than containing the works within a single venue, MONUMENT’AFRICA connects the château, church, theatre and museum as one shared exhibition environment.

03

A Scenography of Encounters

Gonçalo Mabunda — The Throne of the Emperor of Gaza, 2018.

The scenography is conceived as a succession of situations rather than a sequence of isolated objects: a suspended dolphin, a throne that forces the visitor to change course, spectral figures in the theatre, angels in the presbytery and paintings that appear to emerge from the walls.

Visitors move through states — amazement, discomfort, contemplation, displacement. At the scale of Saint-Épain, the exhibition becomes a lived experience in which contemporary African art, heritage and the memory of Calder meet without becoming fixed.

04

Participating Artists

  • Igshaan Adams
  • Marion Boehm
  • Bianca Bondi
  • Aliou Diack
  • Omar Victor Diop
  • Novíssimo Edgar
  • Kendell Geers
  • Kelvin Haizel
  • Pieter Hugo
  • Fidelis Joseph
  • Lebohang Kganye
  • Alexandre Lenoir
  • N’dary Lo
  • Gonçalo Mabunda
  • Ferdinand Kokou Makouvia
  • Gérard Quénum
  • Yinka Shonibare CBE RA
  • Moffat Takadiwa
  • Uman
  • Dominique Zinkpè
MONUMENT’AFRICA | Margaux and Raphaël Blavy Collection