Pélagie Gbaguidi (from Benin born in Dakar in 1965), lives and works in Brussels. Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary griot - a West-African storyteller, redefining the dimension of orality in traditional heritage through her own approach to plasticity. Gbaguidi often alludes to overlooked stories, ridding them of simplifications and archetypes produced by so-called official historiography.

Her oeuvre forms a new timeline of colonial and post-colonial history on which traces of trauma, symbols, associations, and new, composite archetypes counter the official version that skirts that period’s oppression, horror, and legacy. She uses her knowledge of the archives to recontextualise past events, to break the chain of injustice that has cycled unbroken ever since.