Eleonore Hellio

(France, ?)

Artist and teacher. Eléonore Hellio's interest in electronic arts arose in the early 1990s, when she became one of the main contributing artists of the Electronic Café International. Today as an artist and teacher he develops open creative systems and educational programs in various contexts with numerous partners, most of whom are based on the African continent. Network Art, with or without technology, is at the center of his practice.

Since 1996, Hellio has taught art and media at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg and, since 2006, at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa. He organizes workshops, makes films, installations, performances and publishes texts and photographic works, alone and in collaboration with numerous professionals, particularly in the context of Kongo Astronauts, a collective he founded in 2013 with the performance artist Michel Ekeba. At the same time, he participates in a wide range of art and research projects that bring together international thinkers around issues related to the impact of digital globalization and the challenges posed by the postcolonial era. He regularly collaborates with SPARCK, a cross-platform experimental pan-African curatorial platform, and has established the gallinanetwork.org hub.

Eléonore Hellio's Upside Down World video is available on KB17. Hellio herself, taking pains to emphasize that it is a collective work, made with ten artists based in Lusanga whom she directed in a workshop in 2016, explains that the video was filmed within the framework of an ongoing project with which she has been closely associated. Started in 2014 by Dutch artist Renzo Martens in Lusanga, on a cocoa plantation owned by the American conglomerate Unilever, the project is named CATPC (Cercle d'art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise). In part, the work is a response to the presence at the project site of a work of art by German artist Carsten Höller: a pair of glasses that allow its wearers to see the world upside down. Well known in the Euro-American contemporary art scene, Höller's glasses were discussed at length by workshop participants as a metaphor for the “North's” misinterpretation of Congolese lives and experiences.