After The End is an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Metz, showcasing artists from the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and other post-colonial regions. Through their work, these artists from former colonies seek to present a fresh perspective on the world, offering new ways of imagining the future and inspiration for navigating today’s multiple crises.
Bringing together the work of 40 international artists, After the End - Cartographies for Another Time seeks to question Western narratives rooted in old colonial systems.
To do this, it offers stories that are new or ancestral, popular or modern, while promoting a better appreciation of the world's diversity.
The exhibition is curated by the Spanish art historian Manuel Borja-Villel and is organised around artists who explore the diaspora and question our so-called modernity, with the aim of imagining "other worlds beyond the end of time, beyond our own time," as the team describes it, while highlighting the importance of communities.
Cyclical times, connected areas
Borja-Villel, who was director of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid between 2008 and 2023, said he wanted to avoid presenting the artworks in a linear, chronological order.
Instead, he chose to reflect on the Mayan concept of cyclical time, exploring the past, present, and future.
"The exhibition is organised like a loop," Borja-Villel told RFI.
"So you have here a junction between two movements. You could go one side or the other. You can choose to go to the end and then go back. And there are many elements that repeat."
In terms of exhibition spaces, it proposes a dialogue between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, between the Caribbean and the Middle East, and between water and land, he added.
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The highlights include Cuba, Guadeloupe, Mexico, the USA, and Brazil on one side, and Morocco, the Canary Islands, and Palestine on the other.
"All those elements are interlinked. Time for us is not progressive, not linear," Borja-Villel said. "It's not one sequence that goes into the other, but ... a spiral."
He wanted to show western audiences that they live in terror of what is outside their zone of experience, things that are designated as 'other'.
"We need somehow to liberate our frame of thinking. And the only way to liberate ourselves of our way of thinking is together with others. So this is more or less what we are proposing here in this exhibition," he said.
Connecting different parts of world history, and different sides of the globe, the show aims to demonstrate that all these parts are related, and that the border is a colonial structure.
In doing so, the curator aims to challenge colonialist thinking - the notion that some individuals arrive at a so-called "empty" land, and conquer it. If there are people already living there, they regard them as uncivilised.
Multiple conversations
Among the featured artists are Wifredo Lam and Belkis Ayón from Cuba, Olivier Marboeuf from Guadeloupe, and the Algerian painter Baya.
For Nadir Bouhmouch and Soumeya Ait Ahmed, part of the Tizintizwa collective in Casablanca, Morocco, it was an occasion to show their most recent film, on the disappearance of the indigenous people of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, when Spanish conquistadors arrived.
"It is a remnant of a trace, of a linguistic trace of a people that lived there before the Spanish came," Bouhmouch told RFI.
"The people were our distant cousins from 5,000 years ago, who decided to cross the ocean and go to the Canary Islands from what is now Morocco."
The film shows how the islands on the shores of Africa are connected to the Caribbean and the Americas, through the Spanish conquests.
Finally, Brazilian artists are also featured, as part of the 2025 Brazil's cultural season in France.
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The artist Aline Motta presents her film and performance titled Water is a Time Machine. She met Borja-Villel in Brazil at the Sao Paulo Biennial, and he invited her to be part of the exhibition at the gallery which was opened in May 2010 in north-eastern France as a sister museum to its better-known Paris counterpart,
"After The End, for me, can mean many things", Motta told RFI. "It can be like after the pandemic. It can be after a world that we imagine that doesn't exist anymore. So, we need new tools. And I think this exhibition can offer some alternatives, to deal with the present moment."
AFTER THE END CARTOGRAPHIES FOR ANOTHER TIME
From 25 January to 1 September 2025
