Luna Mahoux

Film

Écouter l'audio

Memphis, Tennessee. Rapper Lachat (Chastity Daniels) takes us on a journey through her own stories, guiding us through a city full of ghosts and dreams. Memphis is the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel, and it was never the same after that. We see music queens and ghosts from a time that cannot be named. 

After the death of her best friend, the rap icon Gangsta Boo, in 2023, Lachat gives us an intimate account of where it all began for her.

Luna Mahoux

Luna Mahoux graduated in painting from ENSAV - La Cambre (Brussels) in 2022 and pursued a double degree at ENSA - Paris-Cergy. She is currently a student in the Vera Molnàr class at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing).

Luna Mahoux's primary material consists of images found on the internet and social media, depicting or documenting Black bodies and their stories, whether private or public. By exploring these buried digital memories, which often overlook their own narrative and political potential, Luna exhumes, remixes, and reassembles these images, or makes screenshots, enlarging them without concern for quality to emphasize instead the evocative power of the pixel as a tool of resistance against capitalism and the erasure of racialized bodies.

By monumentalizing these so-called "poor" images (as defined by Hito Steyerl), Luna Mahoux reestablishes an emotional and engaged connection to the Black diaspora and pays tribute to forgotten archives, currents, and trends that weave communities together and bring moments of intensity into existence. She pursues similar objectives as a curator.

She writes and produces documentaries and archives often marginalized music, which she seeks to make visible. Her DJ sets reflect this approach, telling stories across various musical genres.

Luna Mahoux’s practice of collecting is also always a collaborative one: she seeks out the people behind the stories she explores. She engages with them to find an appropriate form of bearing witness. In 2021, she traveled to Chicago for four months. She documented her stay in the publication 2strongfor2long, a book that tells stories through screenshots and memory.

In 2024, she traveled to Memphis to document her first film on La Chat and Gangsta Boo (RIP), with whom she toured Memphis through La Chat’s eyes and her ghosts.

Renoiterrible combines personal and musical archives, representing the emotional relationship linking her own story to that of the diaspora. She lets the fragments speak for themselves, embracing gaps and fractures to create a poetic and powerful blend of experiences and memories.

Against forgetting as a cultural pathology, “what is exhumed would thus be more 'real' and more 'true' than everything accumulated so far to construct the present,” in the words of Mohamed Almusibli.

Since 2022, her work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including Mécène du Sud (Montpellier), Les Chichas de la pensée (residency); Festival Circulation(s) at CENTQUATRE-PARIS; KANAL - Centre Pompidou (Brussels); Basel Social Club (Basel); CALM (Lausanne); after hours - AFTRHRS (Paris); Marres (Maastricht); Maison des arts George & Claude Pompidou – MAGCP (Cajarc); Cherish (Geneva). In 2023, she received the .tiff - EmergingBelgian Photography Prize and exhibited at FOMU (Antwerp) and won the Fintro - EmergingBelgium Prize for 2024-2025. She is also part of the Mont-Rouge Salon for 2024-2025.

Text by Anne-Françoise Le Suisse, Annette Amberg, Mohamed Almusibli, Caroline Honorien.

Production

Credits