"Leïla Payet is working on the "fabrication narrative" of the island territory she inhabits. From a research atlas containing reserves of images and data, she composes open-ended and dialogical works. These are partly concerned with what is called "primitive" or "exotic" art and the ways in which they exist on the periphery of globalized thought. Conceived as embryonic productions based on a primary language, her works are elaborated in the following ways like "ritornellas, graphic programs, jets of thought".
Each corpus, including the central No statues/No statut, thus explores the processes of fabrication of a thought, a discourse or an image, raising sensitive questions about the "processes of creolisation" intimately linked to colonisation and decolonisation.
She thus constructs a global work that moves back and forth, focusing on the permeability of the ideas that circulate within it and the
non-hierarchy of the plastic vocabulary that composes it, between major and minor art, good and bad taste, image artistic, technical, media or vernacular. A work under construction, which questions our "forms of seeing" and carries a struggle for the rehabilitation of histories, languages and territories that are invisible, contorted, dispossessed."
Leïla Quillacq, text excerpt and interview with the artist, for artists' papers Reunion Island, 2020.