Vase Varangue brings into conversation two techniques that a class hierarchy opposes: the popular craft of vacoa weaving and the fine craft of porcelain, as well as two spaces, the veranda, the outdoor living room of the white Creole houses where porcelain services marked social and racial status, and the backyard where vacoa objects were woven, a craft carried out by lower-class women. Two materials, one mineral and fragile, the other vegetal and solid, two colours, white as a sign of purity and brown as a sign of impurity, in the Western racial nomenclature. Two worlds that clash, marked as they are by the social and racial inequality that defines them and the liminal space that brings them into contact. The vacoa both cuts and holds the porcelain, highlighting what is often invisible, the contribution of non-European peoples to the ‘white’ world.

_{In-residence project at la Manufacture de Sèvres
Text by Françoise Vergès
Photos by Souleymane Bachir Diaw}

_{↓ Estampe de A. Roussin, Album de l'île de la Réunion : recueil de dessins représentant les sites les plus pittoresques..., 1860.}

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