Filmmaker Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a lecture-performance exploring the continuing impact of Slavery on Black lives today. The work is inspired by his role as an extra in a BBC adaptation Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in which Jean-Baptiste played a slave on a replica slave ship. The harsh conditions on set triggered his asthma, forcing him to leave the production. In bringing this experience to the stage, Jean-Baptiste questions the structures of cinema and the consequences of recreating violent histories on Black bodies.

The title, It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name, is borrowed from Nina Simone’s 1962 song about racial injustice, and refers to Simone’s decision to change her name to keep her music career hidden from her family.

Through this performance, Jean-Baptiste sheds light on racial profiling and the struggles of extras, who are often ignored, challenging how marginalised people are treated in performance spaces and questioning the way their labour is used in art.

Followed by a conversation between Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Yasmina Price.

Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker who works between Brussels and Paris. He grew up in France, in the context of the Guyanese and West Indian diaspora. His film Listen to the Beat of Our Images (2021) was selected for ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, Sundance Film Festival, and IDFA, among others. His first feature film, Kouté vwa (2024), premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.

Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers.

This event is organised in collaboration with Tate Modern and World Records.