Rarely—if ever-shown in France, Martine Syms' videos are tackling very present issues, such as the becoming—screen of contemporary social life, the systematic mise-en-scene of the self, the meme-ification of the real, and the intensity of social inequalities, while registering and extending the history of American visual culture. With She Mad: Laughing Gas, a new episode of a sitcom started in 2015, she remakes a 1907 short film (Edwin Porter's Laughing Gas), one of the very first films to stage a black principal role, i.e. actress Bertha Regustus. In this remake, the heroin crosses the vagaries of the American health system, of urban space, and of media representations thanks to an endless laugh—comedy as a way to take over issues of race, gender, and social inequalities.
The video Notes on Gesture is a series of energizing gifs, the updated version of a 17th-century treatise Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand. It offers a repertoire of African-American women body and verbal language, highlighting how our bodies (hands, hair, face) constantly respond to social, cultural, and identity stimuli. The power of stereotypes and viral images versus gestures of empowerment: an ethnography of our days.