Film Screening & Talk: Chœurs Atlantiques Tales from the Atlantic Beyond

Chœurs Atlantiques Tales from the Atlantic Beyond is a 2025 Michigan State University Research Foundation funded documentary feature born from a deep commitment to contributing to the urgent task of decolonizing memory —specifically, the memory of the French slave trade and colonial slavery in the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe that is sensitive to the global entanglements of race, power, memory and history. Starting from a reflection on Martinican artist Laurent Valère’s monumental sculpture CAP 110, commemorating victims of the slave trade, this film camera travels to listen, to learn, and to amplify voices that tell not only stories of what was endured, but also stories of resistance, cultural vitality and creativity. 

Chœurs Atlantiques weaves together oral testimony, music, archival images, and artistic expressions of black diasporic identity to explore how memory survives in art, in music, song, rituals, oral traditions, in family stories and silences, and in resistance. The title itself speaks to these choral memories—voices layered over one another across time, space, bodies, landscapes, and the black Atlantic. 

The film invites viewers to sit with the weight of what has been forgotten, erased, or deliberately misremembered and artistic responses to it in the Francophone Caribbean space. Featured Afro-descendant artists from the French Caribbean affirm that their memory work — creative, political, and spiritual—is both a living archive as well as an affirmation of cultural agency and sovereignty.