Born in 1992 in the Paris region, Christelle Oyiri is a Paris-based French producer, DJ (under the pseudonym Crystallmess), writer, and artist of Ivorian and Guadeloupean origin. Combining film, music, performance, and sculpture, her radically interdisciplinary work deals with themes of colonial alienation and alternative temporalities. Faced with the deliberate erasure of narratives outside the dominant canon, Christelle Oyiri looks for information between the lines. Her research is focused on the tonalities, textures, and visual vernacular of the music, art, popular culture, and youth cultures within and outside the African diaspora. Her work has been shown in several institutions and exhibitions around the world such as Cinéma Nova, Brussels, Gaîté-Lyrique, Lafayette Anticipations, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Festival Les Urbaines, Switzerland.
Christelle Oyiri’s project Gentle Battle examines her research on belligerence, defense mechanisms, and trauma responses through her relationship with one of her countries of origin: Ivory Coast. Her focus is on Logobi, a dance from the streets of Abidjan, whose movements are based on the art of bluffing and mimicry. Logobi never reallyexisted as an actual dance on the dance floor, gaining relevance and strength through battles, competitions, and confrontations. At the end of the 2000s, it became a phenomenon amongst black French youth from the Paris banlieues. Atribute to logobi’s influence on Parisian urban culture, Christelle Oyiri’s project will take the form of a video, featuring dancers as well as interviews with therapists, psychiatrists, and members from the African communities in theParis region.