In Secteur IX B, a livewire of a new film by MATHIEU K. ABONNENC, we meet an anthropologist struggling to finish a book project, but gripped by something worse than writer’s block. She is studying the famous Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a two-year journey across Africa by a team that included the surrealist writer Michel Leiris — and studying insects too, their collection, their contagion. But the art at Dakar's Musée de l'IFAN has turned lifeless, and so she starts swallowing mysterious black pills, psychoactive antimalarials of the kind Leiris took in the 1930s. In Paris things are no better, and in the shell of the Trocadéro, where Picasso first saw west African sculpture, she tells her colleague, “When I wake up, I don’t even remember my own name.” The museum is beautiful but catching; you need to take your medicine.
