MAMCO and the Grand Théâtre Genève, both of which are currently closed to the public for refurbishment, are joining forces to screen Derek Fordjour’s film Fly Away (2020).
Fly Away is staging a central character—an African American jockey—accompanied by musicians playing in near darkness. The film grew out of a performance devised with choreographer and puppeteer Nick Lehane for the 2020 exhibition Self Must Die at New York’s Petzel Gallery. It is set to a score that shifts between dramatic oboe (that would not be out of place in a Schoenberg composition) and a festive steel band. It depicts a puppet, dressed in horse-racing attire, performing a sequence of everyday actions—running, falling, making awkward gestures, and trying but failing to exude gravitas—with only a coffin and some confetti as props. The piece ends with a funeral jazz tribute to the jockey, who attempted to escape the constraints of white control, echoing Derek Fordjour’s own attempt to operate within the arena of commerce while recognizing that freedom—particularly for a Black person in America—still has limits.
Since the 2010s, Derek Fordjour, born in 1974 in Memphis to Ghanaian parents, is building a practice around large-scale collages: layer upon layer of newspaper, cardboard, and glitter form the groundwork of his compositions. After applying successive coats of paint, he tears and reshapes the layered surface, producing an appearance that is simultaneously built-up and worn away. His exhibitions reveal a practice shaped by memory, drama, and catharsis. For his first major institutional solo show, held in 2020 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, visitors were invited to enter a makeshift shelter caught in the midst of a storm. His more recent exhibition Nightsong—presented at the David Kordansky Gallery in 2025 and described as a “giant music box in the dark”—was conceived as a tribute to Black American music.
- Artists : Derek Fordjour (USA) and Nick Lehane (USA)
- Technical : Film, installation, single-channel digital video, color, sound
- Dimensions : 32 minutes and 27 seconds, image ratio 16 :9
- Puppet Design : Robert Maldonado
- Production Manager : Caren Celine Morris
- Oboist : Stuart Breczinski
- Lighting and Set Design : Marika Kent
- Sound Design/Dramaturg : Christopher Darbassie
- Movement Consultant : Joseph Lymous
- Theatrical Design and Consultant : Seth Kelly
- Costume Design : Rebecca Zammit
- Props Design : Pablo Diaz
- Props Coordinator : Maggie Ellis
- The exhibition is curated by Julien Fronsacq
