Christelle Oyiri

An interstellar exploration of rap stardom told through digital artifacts, personal memories and cosmic reveries.

Daisy, a young soldier in the anti-terrorism brigade, patrols the city with her two team members. Then suddenly, an explosion stops her in her tracks. She is in shock. Around her, no trace of life. Until a strange child appears and proposes to take her to her missing colleagues.

At a weeklong camp for teenage girls, a counselor leads the campers through a series of exercises that blend the language of female empowerment and body positivity with the kind of radical transparency that makes for good reality TV. The exercises culminate in a bizarre group confessional.

The wanderings of a life-size, anthropomorphic object at the Louvre Museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities. Marginalized by its misshapen appearance, the object — a distorted, mask-like terracotta figurine from the Roman period — attracts a group of friends hanging around the Museum.

Necessary Evil is more of a poem than a video. It is named after the aircraft Necessary Evil that accompanied the Enola Gay during the Hiroshima mission and played a role in documenting the event while symbolizing humanity’s fraught relationship with technological progress. Its name reflects the dark choices that are linked to advancements in history, where progress often unfolds through morally ambiguous actions.

Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi celebrates the forgotten history of Logobi—an Ivorian folk dance originating from the streets of Abidjan, Ivory Coast that emerged in Paris’s banlieues among Black French youth in the late 2000s through the early 2010s. Its accelerated speed and movements draw from the art of bluffing and miming. The dance rarely existed inside club spaces: instead, crews would organize their own dance battles and perform in public spaces like subway stations, malls, or streets.

War! Club! Action! is an ode to Douk Saga (1974-2006), the creator of the Ivorian-French musical genre called Coupé Décalé. This popular music genre plays a great part in Oyiri’s music practice with its maximalism and club culture ethos. Coupé Décalé was born in the midst of the Ivorian political crisis and civil war yet the genre was always synonymous with a raging optimism and hedonism. War! Club! Action! challenges the western idea of protest music, entertainment and anonymity in the music industry. Oyiri deepens and makes explicit the political meaning of Douk Saga's musical production by preceding its "Douk Saga En Fête" video clip with an introductory sequence, as well as a mock interview of a fictional figure: DJ Eminence Grise.

I See You is a love letter to Les Fauvettes, a neighborhood in the North of Paris, set to be demolished in early 2025. Here we follow the daily life of choufs, these lookouts that survey the police and the coming and going of everyone in the neighborhood.