Vashish Soobah
Chez moi

Vashish Soobah (Catania, 1994) presents Chez moi, a new production created specifically for Platea’s exhibition space. The title of the show recalls the numerous bars and restaurants scattered across Mauritius that use the expression Chez in their names — a linguistic legacy of the French colonial period meaning literally “house of.”

Food, explored by the artist for the first time in his practice, becomes a tool for investigation: Soobah proposes a field of reflection that can be read in dialogue with the thought of Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet and theorist who examined the postcolonial experience as a space of creolization, hybridity, and recomposition. Walcott envisions diaspora not as a nostalgic fragmentation, but as an opening toward the rewriting of the self starting from personal traces.The exhibition unfolds through a new video work, produced by the artist in 2025 during a period spent in Mauritius, and a site-specific installation that redefines Platea’s function for the entire duration of the project.

When the Walls Fall

One of the most fragile yet most precious riches of identity, whether personal or collective, lies in the fact that it develops and strengthens continuously (indeed, we never encounter fixed identity models). At the same time, identity cannot be affirmed or consolidated through rules, prescriptions, or laws that would authoritatively define its nature or forcibly guarantee its immutability. The principle of identity realizes or unrealizes itself, sometimes producing phases of regression (the loss of self-awareness), sometimes of pathology (the exacerbation of a collective feeling of superiority). Even the corresponding “recoveries” do not arise from deliberate, well-defined decisions that can then be mechanically applied.

Let us try to approach this complex multiplicity—never given as a whole, nor once and for all—that we call identity. A people or an individual may remain attentive to the movements of their own identity, but cannot predetermine it through principles and postulates.
We could never administer a Ministry of Identity. Otherwise, the life of the collective would become a mechanism, its future aseptic, sterilized by fixed direction, like an experiment in a laboratory. The fact is that identity is above all a being-in-the-world, as philosophers say—a risk one must take, nourished by our relationship with others and with the world; and it is, at the same time, the result of that relationship. Such ambivalence simultaneously nourishes both the freedom to undertake and, beyond that, the courage to change.

National Identity

In the West—and first of all in Europe—communities have formed themselves into nations, whose dual function has been to exalt what were defined as the values of the community, to defend them against external aggression, and, if possible, to export them to the rest of the world. The nation thus becomes a nation-state, whose model gradually imposes itself, defining the fundamental nature of relations among peoples in the modern world. The community living within the nation-state knows why it does so, even if it can never formulate it through postulates and theorems; hence, it expresses this through symbols (the so-called “values”) to which it claims to attribute a “universal” dimension.
Such an organization lies at the root of colonial conquest: the colonizing nation imposes its own values and invokes an identity preserved from any external assault—what we might call an identity of single root. Even though every colonization is, first and foremost, economic exploitation, none can do without this overvaluation of identity that justifies exploitation. The single-root identity thus constantly needs to reassure itself by self-defining—or at least attempting to do so. Yet such a model can also be traced, if not to the origin, at least to the realization of anti-colonial struggles: it was through the claim to a national identity, inherited from the example of the colonizers, that dominated communities found the strength to resist. The schema of the nation-state thus multiplied across the world—with disastrous results.

From this series of evident truths, or commonplaces, we can draw two conclusions.
First, that newly constituted nations—or those that have changed regime—rarely advance toward an idea of the nation unbound from a rigid and exclusive identity imperative. It seems to us that only post-apartheid South Africa has expressed the need for a deliberately mixed organization, for an ideal of exchange not governed by decrees or ministerial ordinances. An organization in which Blacks, Zulus, Whites, mixed-race people, and Indians could live together without domination or conflict: the vocation of a relational identity that goes beyond the mere juxtaposition of ethnicities or cultures—what today is often called multiculturalism.
On the other hand, only when the nation-state is threatened in its very existence can one understand the necessity, for national identity, to forge itself as an instrument of defense (and to decide who is a traitor to the nation and who is not), or as a ferment of cohesion—without, however, the need to legislate such an identity. But how can one believe that the French nation today is in such profound danger, and that the flow of two or three hundred thousand illegal immigrants from poor African countries constitutes the core of this threat? It seems to us that the organized reaction against such flows reflects above all an ideological concern, rather than one of economic, practical, or social balance.
We have learned that a young orchestral prodigy was born in a garage; his parents, being homeless and immigrants, could have been subject to current deportation decrees. We have learned that the boy who fell from a window while fleeing the police was among the best students in his class. And could France, in the name of a fixed idea of identity, coldly renounce all this? Or will it try to exercise an illusory control over what is unexpected, invaluable, and, in the long term, fertile—over what diversity, unpredictability, and the world’s richness could bring to it?

Making World

Thus, in the full twenty-first century, a great democracy, an old republic, a land defined as the homeland of human rights, unites—within the name of a ministry primarily devoted to repression—the terms immigration, integration, national identity, and co-development. In this chemical compound, the terms clash with one another, cancel one another out, condemn one another, and leave, “in the end,” only the hiccup of regression. In this way, France betrays an uncodifiable part of its own identity—one of the fundamental aspects (the other being colonialism) of its relation to the world: the exaltation of freedom for all.
It is true that democratic space is an arena of extremely violent antagonistic forces, and that this system—the least harmful of all—demands constant attention, almost a warrior’s vigilance. It is also true that we have abandoned the idea of a linear progression of human consciousness, and learned that regression and advancement are inseparable: where the light intensifies, the shadow deepens as well.