Whitewashing is a performance initiated by the artist Rébecca Chaillon and written in collaboration with the writer, director and actress-performer Aurore Déon.

This performative and poetic object, which is partially adapted and reinvented with each performance, is not simply a variation on Carte Noire nommée Désir, a show premiered in 2021, but more like its true essence, the project that brought it into existence.

Since 2017, we’ve focused on a haunting question: How do we talk about our conditions as black women in France? One of the first organic revelations on this performance was the need to work with cliché and fantasy, to let them be deployed onstage and for the work to take place in the eye of those watching. The only rule here is to question the colonial and sexist subconscious directed at bodies too often made invisible. The effort on the part of those watching is palpable, they are invited to be patient or on the contrary to become impatience itself, to bring about change. Onstage, and in society.

Performed by a deeply connected duo with opposite strengths. One is practically furniture, immobilized, drowning in a floor that is never white enough: She’s the one who is manipulated but who is in charge.

The other one is free, powerful and mischievous, she never takes her eyes off us. She becomes lofty height, she is the divinity of (re)construction.

Together, they calmly dissect a history of black women through the suspended images they create and the tragic tales they speak. How do you exist and care for yourself when for so many years black women have been bound to the mission of caring for the world? Waiting on people, watching other people’s kids and elders, cleaning, doing hair, washing, assisting, protecting, feeding. Without dying.

The angular cold white space sweats, to maintain it is a Sisyphean task. The show uses hypnotic contemplation and pedagogical repetition to reformat those minds that wish to be disalienated from a blinding system. Without ever forgetting the humor and mischievousness that work like oil to make the questions penetrate the deepest layers of dermis.