MAMCO and the Grand Théâtre Genève, both of which are currently closed to the public for refurbishment, are joining forces to screen Derek Fordjour and Nick Lehane’s film Fly Away (2020).
Fly Away is staging a central character—an African American jockey—accompanied by musicians playing in near darkness. The film grew out of a performance devised with choreographer and puppeteer Nick Lehane for the 2020 exhibition Self Must Die at New York’s Petzel Gallery. It is set to a score that shifts between dramatic oboe (that would not be out of place in a Schoenberg composition) and a festive steel band. It depicts a puppet, dressed in horse-racing attire, performing a sequence of everyday actions—running, falling, making awkward gestures, and trying but failing to exude gravitas—with only a coffin and some confetti as props. The piece ends with a funeral jazz tribute to the jockey, who attempted to escape the constraints of white control, echoing Derek Fordjour’s own attempt to operate within the arena of commerce while recognizing that freedom—particularly for a Black person in America—still has limits.
Since the 2010s, Derek Fordjour, born in 1974 in Memphis to Ghanaian parents, is building a practice around large-scale collages: layer upon layer of newspaper, cardboard, and glitter form the groundwork of his compositions. After applying successive coats of paint, he tears and reshapes the layered surface, producing an appearance that is simultaneously built-up and worn away. His exhibitions reveal a practice shaped by memory, drama, and catharsis. For his first major institutional solo show, held in 2020 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, visitors were invited to enter a makeshift shelter caught in the midst of a storm. His more recent exhibition Nightsong—presented at the David Kordansky Gallery in 2025 and described as a “giant music box in the dark”—was conceived as a tribute to Black American music.
Artists : Derek Fordjour (USA) and Nick Lehane (USA)
Technical : colour digital video, sound
Dimensions : 32 minutes and 27 seconds
Puppeteers: Dorothy James, Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, Jon Riddleberger, Emma Wiseman
Music: © 2020 Hassan Anderson, John Aylward, All Rights Reserved
Oboist/Composer: Hassan Anderson
Oboist: Stuart Breczinski
Producer: Danni Pascuma
Composer: John Aylward
Production Stage Manager: Caren Celine Morris
Lighting and Theatre Designer: Marika Kent
Sound Designer/Dramaturg: Christopher Darbassie
Movement Consultant: Joseph Lymous
Theatre Design and Construction: Seth Kelly
Puppet Design: Robert Maldonado
Costume Design: Rebecca Zammito
Props Coordinator: Maggie Ellis
Props Design: Pablo Diaz
- The exhibition is curated by Julien Fronsacq
