Mayotte pour Revue Pays, 2022
From May to July of 2022, I was doing a residency program on the island of Mayotte. A small rock of the coast of Madagascar and in the Comore archipelago. The specific work made for the residency can be seen in another post, here is the result of a parallele commission by the french magazine Pays. Always choosing a scale, they observe a territory in each issue, a neighborhood, a town or a region. For their issue on Mayotte, they asked me to look at the place of religion on the island. With 95% of it’s population beeing Muslim, Mayotte is a exception in France and in the very secular country, Mayotte has the particularity of tolerating much more religious visibility to it’s representatives. Some of the muslim representatives, the Khadi -in charge of setteling disputes and of weddings- are even state employes. Some see this cohabitation between religion and state to be an example in the French political landscape, where the question of religion in the public eye is a major issue.
